A Method for Retrospective Dose Evaluation in Interventional Radiology using DICOM Header Information

Skin dose assessment in interventional radiology (IR) procedures can be made retrospectively by using the dose-area product (DAP) registered and data provided by the DICOM header, in facilities having a PACS or other alternative image archiving system, such as medical CD-ROM under DICOM standard. Patient skin dose evaluation based on this method can help to decide on the need for further clinical patient follow up on a quantitative basis, in case of high skin doses. Also for patients undergoing repeated procedures, later overirradiation of the same skin region and skin injuries could be avoided by changing X-ray beam incidences, in accordance to the assessed skin dose distribution. The present work describes an exploit of the DICOM header information from procedures to estimate the skin dose distribution, making use of performance output data of the X-ray tube measured on quality control (QC) routine checks.