Accuracy and quality control of skin dose mapping software: results from the VERIDIC project

One of the main radiation protection issues in interventional cardiology is the risk of high doses to the patient skin, potentially leading to tissue reaction in case of protracted or repeated procedures. Skin dose is challenging to measure but various software products are available to the medical physicists to calculate and map the dose to the patient skin. However, these skin dose mapping (SDM) software products might have very different capabilities and no commonly accepted protocol exists to benchmark them.

Based on existing works from EURADOS WG12 Dosimetry in medical imaging, the VERIDIC project (Validation and Estimation of Radiation skin Dose in Interventional Cardiology) was a joint effort of 10 European partners funded by the European Commission to address this issue.
At the end of the project, a collaboration between EURADOS and EFOMP was started to include SDM software in EFOMP’s protocol for quality control of angiographic systems.

After an introduction to EURADOS and VERIDIC project, we will give an brief overview of SDM software products, their calculation algorithm and limitations. Then we will address the accuracy and performance of SDM products. Finally, we will present EFOMP’s approach to quality control of angiographic systems and how it tackles skin dose mapping software products.