Current practice for detecting radiation exposure sentinel events is based on a general threshold and doesn't take into account patient- and exam-specific clinical characteristics, according to senior author Jianhua Yao, PhD.
"This practice is nonspecific and prone to missing outliers from pediatric patients," Yao told AuntMinnie.com.
In response, the NIH group has proposed a statistical method to provide context-dependent CT radiation sentinel event detection. With their approach, patient-specific characteristics such as age, gender, and body size and study-specific information such as scanning protocols are fed into a statistical model to determine the outliers.
"The detection engine is seamlessly integrated with the PACS with low cost and is fully automated," Yao said. "The system is more specific and sensitive than the current threshold-based practice."
For all the details, sit in on this Wednesday morning presentation by study co-author Dr. Ronald Summers, PhD.
