One of the most exciting – and talked about – sessions at RSNA was called “Radiation Dose: Can It Be Too Low?” The expert panel had a healthy debate on radiation dose and risk, and finally reached an agreement that CT scans should be limited to “justified and optimized studies.” (HealthImaging.com has a good recap of the panel’s discussion.)

The debate about risk can go on, but when practicing medicine (radiology) with real patients, the obligation is to both minimize risk AND maximize benefit.

So the challenge for radiologists is to lower dose as much as possible without compromising the amazing diagnostic power of CT. How to accomplish this is both science and art. But we have discovered at UW that with a combination of low dose technique and low dose CT technology, you can take out up to 40 percent of the radiation dose to the patient (compared to 3 years ago) without having any negative impact on diagnosis. So that number certainly is achievable at most sites.

Could we go even further in dose reduction?

Stay tuned…