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Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | August 12, 2011
Now that he has developed the program, Samei said he wants to use it as a benchmark so the hospital can see if there are variations in quality among different rooms at the same hospital, or between institutions.
Also, if the work pans out, better tracking of dose could help hospital staff catch problems early on. For instance, in a widely reported case, in 2009, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles overexposed hundreds of patients with brain perfusion CT scans. But Samei said if they had a system in place to constantly double-check dose, it possibly could have been stopped.
"Maybe they would have exposed the first two or three, but would have caught it and prevented it from going on for a long time. This would provide us an opportunity to identify cracks in our system, if the cracks exist," he said.
More immediately, Samei said his team is wrapping up a five-year study to relate radiation risk to image quality in pediatric patients, which they hope to have published next year.
"A major motivation of our work is that medical operations are complicated," he said. "They're team oriented, many people are supposed to do different parts of an overall task. And if someone fails in one element of that task, bad things can happen. That's why it is important to have a dose and risk monitoring process in place to ensure we can optimize and maintain a high level of quality of our clinical operations in spite of their inherent complexities."
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