Normalizing medical imaging archives for dose quality assurance and productivity auditing

Quality assurance for planned radiation exposure situations (e.g. x-ray, CT) requires the application of examination-specific scans tailored to patient age or size, body region and clinical indication for ensuring that the dose to each patient is as low as reasonably achievable for the clinical purpose of the image acquisition. Nevertheless, assuring quality implies a heavy manual labor to measure and optimize care services flow. There are already several methodologies and protocols that can be used to achieve this objective. However, the continuous monitoring of quality indicators is still not performed in many healthcare centers. The challenge is to find a way to analyze these metrics in an efficient, effective and convenient manner. Moreover, these results are not often shared, due to confidentiality and privacy of patients and medical staff. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a software tool to aggregate and normalize the monitoring data from distinct points, in order to collect indicators, namely about productivity, efficiency and dose usage, factors that are crucial for benchmarking and for improving the quality of protocol procedures. To evaluate the effectiveness of our solution, several results were collected from two medical institutions.