Researchers at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle launched a hospital-wide quality improvement project, resulting in lowering CT radiation dose by nearly 20%.

In this article, they detailed three initiatives which enabled them to achieve this dose reduction:

“(1) More frequent use of existing low-dose protocols; (2) Development of new protocols specific to patient body size; and (3) Improved patient positioning.”

The combined efforts of radiologists, residents, and CT technologists at this institution “to promote the use of low-dose protocols and improve patient positioning led to statistically significant reductions in radiation dose for all types of CT exams they assessed. On average, the reduction in radiation dose was 18.3% for contrast-enhanced chest, abdomen, and pelvis CT scans and 11.8% for CT pulmonary angiograms, as reported in this article on AuntMinnie.