Presenter Da Zhang, PhD, co-author Larry Barbaras, and senior author Matthew Palmer, PhD, began work on their dose-reporting software development project at the end of 2014 when radiation dose management became a very hot topic and they realized that some work was needed to comply with proposed requirements from the Joint Commission.
While most of their institution's CT systems were already compliant with the Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance's Smart Dose (XR-29) rules, dose reporting on other CT scanners would be possible only with custom software development, according to Palmer. However, none of the commercially available IT offerings for dose monitoring offered the flexibility and customizability they wanted.
"There existed a base of very sophisticated open-source software that could be configured as the building blocks of a system," he told AuntMinnie.com. "Being a large academic medical center with on-staff programmers and IT professionals, we were able to put this all together with modest effort."
The resulting CT radiation dose tracking and reporting system can facilitate CT dose reporting and management, according to the group. Over the course of data collection, the researchers have found inconsistencies that were not trivial in the adoption of DICOM Radiation Dose Structured Reports (RDSR) across vendors and platforms, especially in the handling of protocol names, Palmer said.
In addition, they've "experienced an upswell of interest in CT radiation dose and protocol optimization amongst the radiology faculty, as a result of the data-rich review process that our system has enabled," he said.
