RESTON, VA: A new educational campaign, called “Image Wisely,” will launch later this month to help prevent excessive radiation exposure in adult patients.
The campaign is a joint partnership between the American College of Radiology, Radiological Society of North America, American Association of Physicists in Medicine and American Society of Radiologic Technologists.
The main focus of the campaign will be a website, which will house scientific information to help medical providers optimize the safest radiation dose for each patient. “Image Wisely” builds off the “Image Gently” campaign, which launched in 2008 to encourage careful use of CTs scans in children, said Shawn Farley, director of public affairs for the American College of Radiology.
The new campaign is being launched in the wake of a Food and Drug Administration investigation, which found that overdoses of radiation to more than 380 patients undergoing CT brain perfusion scans were likely due to improper use of the scanners.
“This new campaign needed to be a collaborative approach. There are so many moving parts to it, from the doctors who supervise the care and/or read the images to the medical physicists who have to set up the machinery correctly to the technologists who actually operate the scanner,” Farley told PRWeek. “We need to make sure the amount of radiation a patient experiences from the scan is no more than it absolutely has to be.”
“Image Wisely” will launch at the annual conference for the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago November 28 to December 3, which attracts about 60,000 physicians and medical physicists worldwide.
As a result of its investigation, the FDA also sent a letter to the Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance, the industry organization which represents CT scanners and other radiological imaging devices, outlining possible equipment enhancements that could help improve patient safety.
