Original InvestigationWeekly Dose Reports: The Effects of a Continuous Quality Improvement Initiative on Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography Radiation Doses at a Tertiary Medical Center
Section snippets
Financial Disclosure
The study was approved by the human research committee of the institutional review board and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act guidelines was maintained. The requirement for informed consent was waived for this quality assurance study. All authors have no relevant financial disclosures and had unrestricted control of the data at all stages of the study. No outside funding was used.
Study Cohort
This study includes a total of 450 consecutive patients that underwent
Results
No differences in baseline patient characteristics were seen between control and intervention period (postintervention) (Table 1). Total radiation dose in mSv was lower in the postintervention period (3.4 mSv [1.7–5.7]) and late control period (3.3 mSv [2.0–5.3]) compared to the preintervention period (4.1 mSv [2.1–6.6]), a statistically significant difference (P = .005).
In the postintervention period, 97.3% of all cCTAs resulted in a radiation dose <10.0 mSv versus 88.0% in the preintervention
Discussion
Relatively high radiation doses are often cited as a counterargument to the use of cCTA (24). However, at our institution we have demonstrated that cCTA carefully performed using relatively simple and widely available default protocol recommendations (20), we can achieve routine cCTA doses with a median dose, lower than that of an invasive diagnostic angiography or the most commonly used noninvasive modality, nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging (25). These results are concordant with the work
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The authors report no conflict of interests.