In this article, the research conducted by University of Washington Radiology Fellow Dr. Achille Mileto and colleagues highlight the importance of dose monitoring, but also the challenges: “Successful efforts to reduce overall radiation doses may actually direct attention away from other critical pieces of information that have so far been underappreciated, namely the widespread variability in global radiation dose values across clinical operation volumes.” … “These data may provide a foundation for the future development of best-practice guidelines for patient-specific radiation dose monitoring.”

Dr. Achille Mileto from the University of Washington

“We are kind of obsessed with radiation dose reduction, but I think we should keep in our minds the concept of radiation dose optimization, which means trying to adjust the dose to the specific clinical task,” Mileto said. “With technology we are reducing the dose, but we are increasing the room for variability. This is great if you are consistently reducing the dose, but we really want to understand what’s going on in terms of variability. So I think the main lesson is to try to develop best-practice guidelines for patient-specific radiation dose monitoring. I think basically the scenario in the near-term future will be to create some kind of shared library for radiation doses.”