Our goal was to investigate the feasibility of an open-source, PACS-integrated, DICOM header-based tool that automatically provides granular data for monitoring of CT radiation exposure. To do so, we constructed a radiation exposure extraction engine (RE3) that is seamlessly connected to the PACS using the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) toolkit (DCMTK) and runs on the fly within the workflow. We evaluated RE3’s ability to determine the number of acquisitions and calculate the exposure metric dose length product (DLP) by comparing its output to the vendor dose pages. RE3 output closely correlated to the dose pages for both contiguously acquired exams (R² =0.9987) and non-contiguously acquired exams (R² =0.9994). RE3 is an open-source, automated radiation monitoring program to provide study-, series-, and slice-level radiation data.

Date Published: 17 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9418, Medical Imaging 2015: PACS and Imaging Informatics: Next Generation and Innovations, 941813 (17 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2082197

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9418:
Medical Imaging 2015: PACS and Imaging Informatics: Next Generation and Innovations
Tessa S. Cook; Jianguo Zhang, Editor(s)