How many CT’s is too many?

We would like to help the radiologists answer the question: “How many CT’s is too many?”

Mike and Joyce talk about Joyce’s recent presentation to the International Conference on Radiation Protection in Medicine. We review the findings of our Survey on Radiation Safety which she presented at that meeting.

The attendees were primarily radiation physicists, with another 10% of radiologists and radiographers. They are sympathetic with our concerns, but are just now learning how best to communicate with patients about the procedure, the dosage, and the pros and cons of the procedure.

We need to provide some feedback to the radiologists and radiographers as to what we need to know, and how to phrase it in a way that will be meaningful and factual without being alarming.

Please come brainstorm with us too about how we might ask patients to collect their own radiation exposure histories and help us all answer our questions about radiation exposure in medicine.

Slides shown in Bulgaria: https://powerfulpatient.org/archive/2014/imaging-survey-summary.pdf

In the slide show associated with this show you will find some images of the kinds of advancements in medical imaging that are possible now due to the good use of radiation. We don’t want to disrupt these benefits; we do want to make sure that they are being used wisely and judiciously, and hopefully without long-term negative consequences for the environment, for the medical teams, and for the patients.

See also these animated images, which show how some of the tests can give a full-motion video image that can help to identify problems and plan the best approach to solving them:

Fluorescein Angiogram, mapping the blood vessels in the retina of the eye, which would highlight any abnormal branching of the blood vessels, or any weaknesses in the vessels themselves.

In PET scanning, a radioactive isotope is injected into the patient’s bloodstream. This tracer has been developed to grab onto one particular cell type. As it clings to the cells of a tumor, for example, the tumor is highlighted.

Image analyses of biomedical images range from simple analysis (e.g., image normalization, ROI delineation) to more comprehensive analysis (e.g., compartmental kinetic modeling), as is often required for extraction of functional and molecular information from dynamic imaging datasets. Composite PET/CT from the Department of Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin