by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | October 22, 2014
From the September 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“We do everything post process,” Mason says. “We find the edges of the structure of the body before we remove any noise at all.” Another advantage is that Clarity can be used on all makes, models and generations of scanners and if a hospital buys a new scanner, Sapheneia will transfer the license to the new machine.
Satrajit Misra, the CT business unit senior director for Toshiba America Medical Systems, says third party products can only address part of the MITA Smart Dose Standard.
“You need the scanner to support things like automatic exposure control,” Misra says. Reducing noise in images is only one step in an image improvement product, whereas Toshiba’s solution addresses things such as mA, exposure control, reconstruction and dose reporting.
“We address the entire imaging chain, whereas the third party products address the last step,” Misra says.
Watch your dose
PACSHealth makes a PACS-based automated dose monitoring solution, DoseMonitor, which works with multiple modalities, including CT. Its first commercial version was released in 2010 at RSNA and the company has more than 200 sites signed or live, and competes with GE and Radimetrics, which was acquired by Bayer HealthCare in 2013, for market share.
Dose information can be examined with the PACSHealth software on the patient level, looking at a patient’s cumulative radiation exposure, which will be especially important when the Joint Commission requirements take effect. The software also takes the image of the patient and measures them both A-P and laterally, yielding the patient’s effective diameter. It can compare scanners and even look at the individual technologist’s historical dose record.
“The most important thing about dose monitoring has to do with consistency and measuring quality of the product,” says Mike Battin, vice president and chief operating officer of PACSHealth, LLC.
Battin says radiation dose is something that all facilities need to stay on top of, as much as they monitor the IV drugs given to a patient during surgery. Some facilities have even started advertising dose monitoring as a way to stay competitive.
“It’s important for the patient that facilities implement real-time dose monitoring,” Battin says. “The industry had been working diligently to make this a reality in the near future.”
The Radimetrics Enterprise Platform, which was showcased at RSNA in 2013, is a single-platform solution that manages radiation and contrast dose.
“It allows for data access in every area of the workflow,” says Dennis Durmis, head of the Americas region for Radiology & Interventional for Bayer HealthCare.
