Investigations on a Computer Application for Tracking the Mean Glandular Breast Dose Profile in Mammography

摘要

As quality assurance standards determine the use of single phantoms to be used in evaluation tests in mammography, checking the profile of the patients submitted to exams in each equipment is important to drive these tests. In addition, this profile is also relevant in investigations on the actual doses of radiation received by the patients during the exams, mainly in the current digital mammography systems. Therefore this work investigates these aspects regarding a single DR mammography unit, working in a public radiological service, by applying a novel software designed to extract data needed to the quality assurance evaluation from the DICOM files corresponding to the outcomes of the image exam. This software refers to a computational tracking scheme to investigate characteristics of the population submitted to the mammography exams, providing information on the dose profile yielded by the digital equipment Data obtained by this application are compared to those provided by classical experimental tests and they were verified in agreement for such unit. They show that the most of patients relative to this study has a breast thickness profile above of that commonly used in test phantoms, being in the range of 52 to 70 mm. Furthermore the dose profile of this population was verified below the standard limits, which evidences the proposed software application as a useful tool to aid quality assurance programs in digital mammography.