Faculty of Health

United Kingdom (UK) government policy, which has focused on modernising the NHS and making it more responsive to patients' needs, has, in fact, created significant service demand. The Department of Health (DoH) committed itself to changing and improving the organisation and delivery ...

This article provides some practical tips for dose optimization in computed radiography (CR). The article will not provide a comprehensive list of all factors that could be changed to optimize patient dose in CR examination. This article will also provide specific ...

Purpose In Australia, radiology services are provided as full 24-hour services, 24-hour urgent out-of-hours (on-call) services, and business hours-only service. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether out-of-hours (11 PM–7 AM) chest x-ray ( ...

Background Radiographic examinations of the ankle are important in the clinical management of ankle injuries in hospital emergency departments. National (Australian) Emergency Access Targets (NEAT) stipulate that 90 percent of presentations should leave the emergency department within 4 hours. For a radiological report to have clinical usefulness and relevance to clinical teams treating patients with ankle injuries in emergency departments, the report would need to be prepared and available to the clinical team within the NEAT 4 hour timeframe; before the patient has left the emergency department. However, little is known about the demand profile of ankle injuries requiring radiographic examination or time until radiological reports are available for this clinical group in Australian public hospital emergency settings. Methods This study utilised a prospective cohort of consecutive cases of ankle examinations from patients (n = 437) with suspected traumatic ankle injuries presenting...

Objective: The purpose of the study is to evaluate radiographer practice with advanced digital radiography in terms of the values of exposure indices and deviation indices between hospitals in Saudi Arabia. Materials and Methods: The study is based on PACS’ data of paediatric radiographic images limited to the chest and abdomen performed during the last year from four hospitals in Saudi Arabia. P-value was calculated to investigate any significant differences exist between the values of exposure indices and deviation indices of the images, which will be acquired from the DICOM file of image data.Results: Most of the paediatric radiographic images (54%) were underexposed, as these images had deviation index with less than -1 from four hospitals compared to expected results. However, in one hospital, 58% of the images were overexposed. The majority of the underexposed paediatric radiographic images were chest and abdomen radiographic exam (50% and 66% separately). Results also show th...

To investigate a technique for optimizing radiation dose and image quality for a computed radiography system. Entrance skin doses were measured for phantom models of the pelvis and lumbar spine imaged using the vendor's recommended exposure settings (ie, the reference doses) as well as doses above and below the vendor's recommended settings for both body parts. Images were assessed using visual grading analysis (VGA). The phantom dosimetry results revealed strong positive linear relationships between dose and milliampere seconds (mAs), mAs and inverse exposure indicator (EI), and dose and inverse EI for both body parts. The VGA showed that optimized values of 16 mAs/EI = 136 for the anteroposterior (AP) pelvis and 32 mAs/EI = 139 for the AP lumbar spine did not compromise image quality. Selecting optimized mAs reduced dose by 36% compared with the vendor's recommended mAs (dose) values. Optimizing the mAs and associated EIs can be an effective dose management strategy.

This article reviews the parameters that characterise the image quality of digital radiography and the available evaluation methods that are used to measure these parameters. The article also discusses the factors that affect each parameter of image quality. Digital imaging systems are the most commonly utilised technology in the field of radiology. Screen‐film radiography systems are almost replaced by digital radiography. The data acquisition and image processing principles of digital radiography differ from that of conventional radiography. The required exposure factors for each digital radiography system are not the same. Therefore, the image quality should be optimised while lower radiation dose is maintained according to the properties of the specific imaging system. Distinguishing image quality parameters and understanding the factors that control each image quality parameter are essential to optimise and maintain image quality and to reduce radiation dose to the patient. The...