Healthcare experts like technologists, nurses and physicians aim to deliver patient-centric, safe medical care, including imaging. Luckily, there are also patient safety groups like the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) who are here to improve the health care system and help Americans, health care professionals, and policymakers make informed health decisions.

Increasingly, patients are prioritizing their own safety, too, especially around radiation and imaging. Awareness efforts like the Joint Commission’s Speak Up campaign, the joint adult initiative Image Wisely and the pediatric Image Gently campaign show just how important radiation safety is becoming to the general public.

Patient Safety Means a Low Dose CT Scan 

Of course, the aim of a low-dose CT scan is to reduce the amount of radiation that patients are exposed to in order to limit future cancer risks. There is good evidence to suggest that cancer risks increase based on the amount of radiation exposure, across age groups and exam types.¹

What this increased awareness means for institutions is that patients are increasingly drawn to those who promise to take radiation risks seriously by reducing the dose of radiation they will be exposed to during their CT study. There are many possible ways to go about this.

How to Reduce Radiation Exposure

One approach is to order fewer CT scans, which may be an option in some cases, particularly if another CT was recently completed in another institution or if another type of imaging would give the needed clinical information. However, CT provides valuable, life-saving data, and MRI or ultrasound imaging will not always be adequate or appropriate replacements.

Another approach is to use less radiation per scan.  Low radiation protocols generate noisy CT scans. These noisy scans can be de-noised in several ways.

1. Purchase a new scanner – Often the newest, most expensive scanners claim to obtain high-quality images with less radiation by operating more quickly – for example, this Siemens Somatom Force CT scanner boasts effective doses much lower than national requirements. However, this particular machine may sell for over $1 million, making this an unrealistic option. 
2. Refine existing protocols – A quality improvement team can optimize protocols based on the institution’s median dose relative to the national or regional medians, like the data found in the Dose Index Registry. This ongoing process may require many small protocol changes over time, rolled out piecemeal by department, vendor, and machine.²
3. Add vendor-specific iterative reconstruction software – If your group isn’t already using IR technology, this investment can enable low-dose scanning at adequate image quality by using software to reduce noise. However, these vendor-specific options may require high computational power, slow down workflow, and be extremely costly at over $100,000, plus additional costs for yearly maintenance. Not to mention, the resulting image quality may leave something to be desired.
4. Use deep-learning noise reduction software. By using PixelShine, imaging facilities  obtain high-quality images by de-noising low dose noisy CT scans. Our AI-based software is vendor agnostic and can improve the quality of scans obtained from any CT equipment that meets minimum functional requirements. It can do this at a much more reasonable cost than even a single new CT scanner. That's close to 1% of the monthly revenue earned by CT scans, even in a smaller organization. Regardless of the age of your system, PixelShine improves CT quality without a costly system upgrade.

Patient Safety is Priceless: The PixelShine Difference

Because we at Algomedica believe so deeply that patient safety is a moral imperative,  At PixelShine, we are committed to empower imaging facilities to obtain high quality CT scans. 

To find out if PixelShine could work for your institution  contact us. 

References:

1. Smith-Bindman R, Lipson J, Marcus R, et al. Radiation dose associated with common computed tomography examinations and the associated lifetime attributable risk of cancer. Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(22):2078-2086. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2009.427
2. Mayo-Smith WW, Hara AK, Mahesh M, Sahani DV, Pavlicek W. How I do it: Managing radiation dose in CT. Radiology. 2014;273(3):657-672. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.14132328