A New Software for Patient Dose Extraction and Assessment from CT DICOM Images

Radiation dose monitoring is an important objective of radiation safety and quality assurance program. The purpose of this study was to develop an automated approach for monitoring and estimating patient radiation doses from Computed Tomography (CT) examinations, Automated software, based on MATrix LABoratory (MATLAB) environment, was introduced for extracting and analyzing  patient dose identifiers from Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) CT image files. In addition, an estimation of effective dose and statistical studies were implemented. A random sample of 1466 patients’ CT DICOM image files were collected from a 64-slice Siemens’ Somatom Perspective CT scanner. The proposed Graphical User Interface (GUI) extracts the volumetric CT dose index (CTDIvol), the dose length product (DLP) for each phase of scan session in order to calculate the patient radiation effective dose (E). A graphical layout presenting statistical values was were also produced, e according to study date, patient sex, and CT protocol type. The GUI performance was verified according to the manually proceeded results. The extraction speed and accuracy of the radiation dose values were satisfactory, as compared to the approaches presented in literatures such as optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and the direct extraction from the metadata of CT image files. The proposed GUI performs the extraction of CT patient dose metrics CTDIvol, DLP with a satisfactory speed and accuracy. The obtained results could be shown in numerical and graphical formats, and it could be used for radiation dose monitoring and Diagnostic Reference Levels (DRLs) establishing purposes with multiple filtering capacities.