The establishment of national diagnostic reference levels for adult SPECT-CT in Saudi Arabia.
Saeed Mueed Al-QahtaniMoaaz Aqeel AlidasroosEssam M AlkhybariMarwan Ahmed AlthomaliAli Hamed AlomariOmemh BawazeerHassan B HawsawiAli Ibrahim AamryJaber Abdulwahab AsiriAzzam Abdulaziz AloufiAmr Dakhilallah AljehaniMaram Bandar Al-OsaimiAreej Khalid AlosaimiAnwar Khalaf AlsulamiAhmed Yahya SabiTalal Mosa KamliAbdelmoneim SuliemanAbdul-Wali AjlouniPublished in: Journal of radiological protection : official journal of the Society for Radiological Protection (2023)
This study aims to introduce national diagnostic reference levels )NDRLs) for adult hybrid SPECT/CT in nuclear medicine (NM) departments in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Adminis-tered Activity (AA) of radiopharmaceuticals, volume-weighted computed tomography dose index (CTDIvol) and dose length product (DLP) for ten hybrid SPECT/CT examinations were collected and analyzed for one year. The median of AA, CTDIvol and DLP for each dose quantity was derived and the suggested national DRLs were determined based on the 75th percentile for all identified SPECT/CT examinations. A comparison of the defined adult NDRLs in Saudi Arabia with the pub-lished data of other countries was performed. Although there are no significant variations of the proposed NDRL of AA between countries, the proposed NDRLs of the integrated CT metrics ex-ceed the published data in most procedures. NM departments are urged to consider optimization for both image quality and radiation protection.
Keyphrases
- image quality
- computed tomography
- dual energy
- contrast enhanced
- positron emission tomography
- saudi arabia
- pet ct
- quality improvement
- magnetic resonance imaging
- photodynamic therapy
- electronic health record
- magnetic resonance
- systematic review
- randomized controlled trial
- big data
- deep learning
- radiation induced
- radiation therapy