Design and implementation of a radiation dose tracking and reporting system for mammography and digital breast tomosynthesis.

A tracking system has been implemented to monitor radiation dose for digital mammography (DM) and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT). This system communicates with a PACS through DICOM messages that allow the image metadata to be stored in a relational database. The tracking system accepts X-ray breast images, maps the image metadata into a SQL database, and allows a client-side application to report the data using a business intelligence framework. The database contains the DICOM information of 54,244 studies (235,225 images) acquired from four Selenia Dimensions systems. The average time to receive the images, and then extract and write the metadata into the database is 2.28 s for a DM and 3.84 s for a DBT image. Using the stored metadata, physics reports are generated based on chosen criteria (i.e., system model, mammography unit, breast data, acquisition techniques, physician, etc.). Our results show that the mean average glandular dose (AGD) varies significantly with compressed breast thickness and age. We observed an overall dose increase of 25.6% between DM and DBT (1.76 vs 2.21 mGy).