Qaelum

Early-stage detection is key to the prevention of life-threatening diseases; however, limited access to data hinders the ...

One of the main benefits of a radiation dose management system is the possibility to automatically generate alerts when the dose exceeds certain thresholds. These dose thresholds are mainly based on national Diagnostic Reference Levels (DRLs), which are defined for a standard-sized patient. An advanced dose management system offers the possibility to automatically select the group of patients by defining a patient size range in terms of weight, effective diameter or Water Equivalent Diameter (WED). As weight is not always filled in, WED, an attenuation-based metric, has become the favourite parameter to indicate patient size. But how accurately is WED calculated? Are we sure that our group of standard-sized patients does not include patients with wrong size calculation? Especially when everything happens automatically, how can we know that a high dose alert does not indicate a bigger patient for whom the size was not correctly calculated?