If proved successful, virtually any institution accredited by the ACR could use the protocol for weekly quality assurance checks without additional phantoms or extensive preparation.
It would also be in competition with the RSNA's Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance (QIBA) quality assurance process, which requires a special ice water phantom that is not widely available and is difficult to prepare, according to the study authors.
"This project is designed to show that, given the gold standard DWI quality assurance of the QIBA phantom, the ACR phantom can be used to perform DWI quality assurance to the same precision, given an accurate temperature measurement of the ACR phantom," said study co-author Eric Cameron, PhD, a medical physics student at Purdue.
The new DWI quality assurance method based on the ACR phantom thus far has been reproducible and capable of detecting similar deviation from apparent diffusion coefficients (ADCs) as the QIBA DWI quality assurance method, according to the researchers.
"The benefits of the ACR phantom over the QIBA are mainly accessibility and preparation time," Cameron told AuntMinnie.com. "DWI quality assurance could simply be added to the protocol and scanned in the same session as the rest of the weekly quality assurance tests."
There are, however, two caveats: The method with the ACR phantom is limited to one ADC value, and correction for phantom temperature could be an additional source of error.
"This [ACR phantom] is not meant to be a better method than the QIBA phantom, but rather to be more widely accessible so that more clinics can perform DWI quality assurance on a regular basis," Cameron said.
