The call for applications will be open soon.

Monitoring of patient radiation exposure provides objective information to healthcare professionals and authorities responsible for ensuring the justified and optimized use of radiation in medical practice. The benefits of monitoring patient doses have been documented in many publications, and such monitoring has proved to be a key tool for continuous improvement in the optimization of radiation protection of patients, the analysis of individual as well as population-based exposures and the process of justification in medical imaging.
 
Rapid development of digital imaging systems and improved access to the exposure data in a digital format have facilitated patient radiation exposure monitoring by utilizing electronic registries and automatic data collection and analysis.
 
Despite their utility and potential, such digital patient radiation exposure monitoring systems have been implemented only at a limited number of radiological facilities in the world, with notable heterogeneity in their implementation.
 
The workshop will address the technical aspects of patient exposure monitoring, as well as the challenges associated with its full implementation and ongoing maintenance.

From a radiation protection perspective, management of the medical exposure of patients is based on the implementation of the radiation protection principles of justification and optimization. 
The first step in this process is justification, which is carried out at the level of procedure as well as for the individual patient. The second step is registrants and licensees, and radiological medical practitioners shall ensure that protection and safety is optimized for each medical exposure. The optimization of protection and safety for medical exposure of patients is defines as “the management of the radiation dose to the patient commensurate with the medical purpose”. Comprehensive optimization of medical imaging combines the radiation and clinical risks as a unified total risk estimate within a process informed by the diagnostic or interventional objective (the clinical task). In dealing with both radiation risk and clinical risk, optimization is characterized in a patient centred manner. In this wider perspective, optimization leads to increased clinical effectiveness.

Diagnostic Reference Levels (DRLs) and patient dosimetry are recognized as important tools for optimization.

Thus, the goal of patient radiation exposure monitoring is advancing towards this optimization at the individual patient and the operational levels. To serve this optimization goal, radiation exposure monitoring in medical imaging has to include not only dose metrics to consider radiation risk, but also image quality metrics to quantify the clinical outcome. 
Radiation exposure monitoring of patients also provides feedback to decision makers and international organizations to estimate trends in medical imaging doses and practice and their contribution to the collective doses at population level. Availability of a standardized mechanism of collecting and reporting patient radiation exposure data would facilitate this analysis and reduce uncertainties in the estimation of population doses and their comparison between different countries and regions. 

Radiation exposure monitoring of patients is also useful to inform epidemiological and other research studies on radiation effects and risks. 

Topics

Speakers

Dr. A. Trianni, S. Chiara Hospital, Health Physics Department, Italy
Dr H. Bosmans, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Dr M. Steinberger, Germany
Dr M. Brambilla, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Maggiore della Carità, Italy
Dr P. Cornacchione, EFRS representative

Grants: A limited number of grants are available to support the attendance of selected participants, with priority given to participants from developing countries. There is no registration fee.