Program Information

The ACR CT Dose Index Registry: Implementation Challenges and Preliminary Data

K Kanal*, D Zamora, C Price, J Robinson, W Shuman, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

SU-E-I-50 Sunday 3:00:00 PM - 6:00:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall

Purpose: To successfully register our institution into the American College of Ragiology (ACR) CT Dose Index Registry (DIR), to discuss the technical and implementation challenges of doing so, and to review preliminary results.

Methods: TRIAD is the American College of Radiology Imaging Network's (ACRIN) image acquisition and management software, with the purpose of receiving and then transmitting DICOM structured dose report files from institutional CT scanners around the country. TRIAD was installed onto a virtual machine server at our institution so that anonymized and encrypted DICOM structured dose report files from our 6 CT scanners could be sent to the TRIAD Application Server at ACR. Doing so required collaboration between ACR and IT, PACS personnel and the physicist on site. Implementation involved several challenges, such as software installation and data transmission consistency problems. Since numerous institutions are involved, the ACR required an exam mapping process via the Radlex playbook to unify the protocol classification. These challenges have been overcome and data is being successfully transmitted to and analyzed by the ACR.

Results: The first report comparing dose data (CTDI and DLP by examination and by scan) between our site and others around the region and country was made available recently. For each exam, the report includes boxplots and histogram data for a variety of standard protocols. For example, for a CT head exam, our median CTDIvol and DLP were 44 mGy and 736 mGy-cm compared with 64 mGy and 844 mGy-cm respectively, for all other facilities registered in the DIR.

Conclusions: The ACR CT DIR registry is a useful tool for dose data mining and will eventually establish national benchmarks for CT dose indices. Our experience will allow others to anticipate these challenges and have potential solutions available for when they do arise.

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