Radiation exposure in medical imaging has become a major concern all around the world. Specifically, CT scanners carry the highest risk of a high dose of radiation, delivering hundreds of times more radiation than that of a single X-ray image.
Studies have shown a direct relation between CT scans, the chance of getting cancer, and mortality rates. The contradicting problem is that lowering the radiation dose causes inferior image quality, which may result in rescan or a misdiagnosis.
Plexar Imaging, a startup situated in Cleveland, has found an innovative way to reduce unnecessary exposure to radiation in CT scans, by quantifying the lowest dose that will produce acceptable image quality, as determined by the radiologists in a hospital system.
The product of a CT scan is a set of images. The requirement is that the radiologist can make the right diagnosis from those images. With a universal metric based on image quality and a method to calibrate any CT scanner to that metric, PI has developed a way to make sure the desired IQ will be achieved while using only the least amount of radiation that is necessary.
The use of IQ as the measurement unit will help standardize the radiation dosage in CT scans, and will provide, for the first time, a common scale technologists and radiologist can use to communicate with each other.