Qaelum featured in the European Medical Physics News

As a company member of the European federation for medical Physics (EFOMP), Qaelum was featured in the European Medical Physics News with an article about DOSE, our solution for radiation dose management, and how it can help improving patient safety and quality in medical imaging.

EMP News, Summer 2018, p.38-39:

"Qaelum is a medical device manufacturer focusing on patient radiation dose monitoring and quality control solutions. We originated as a spin-off company from the University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium, and our software solutions aim to improve the quality and efficiency of radiology departments all over Europe, the Americas and the Middle East.
Qaelum focuses on patient safety, quality and efficiency in medical imaging. Through the collaboration with EFOMP, Qaelum recognizes the significant role of medical physicists in medical imaging. With the transposition of the European Directive to national legislation, health professionals from all Member States are asked to evaluate and report data from population level to single study level. In order to fulfill these requirements and to handle this load of information, correct tools are necessary. Qaelum’s advanced software solutions with the dose management DOSE as the flagship, are at the forefront of technology.
DOSE is a very useful tool for medical physicists in their daily practice and for their optimization tasks. Its compliance monitoring feature for example, automatically extracts the examination information and prepares it in the correct format for reporting to the responsible authorities, hence eliminating the cumbersome and labor intensive work of manually collecting the doses. It allows benchmarks against Dose Reference Levels and thus pro-actively monitor the performance of your department. It is also a useful tool for dedicated patient dose surveys.
Another important task of a medical physicist is the optimization process of protocols. Trend analysis from DOSE is a useful tool to see whether the optimization has the expected impact on the patient doses, to observe unintended or unexpected changes quickly and initiate actions.
During routine quality assurance (QA), the medical physicist can easily find the most used examination protocols in clinical practice, helping him/her to define what needs to be tested first. Also the workload analysis could give information on the availability of the system and thus could be used to plan the testing procedures during unused time slots.
Hospitals with different systems could use DOSE to do a system comparison. If similar examinations result in different doses, it could initiate the optimization of protocol settings and thus trigger an optimization procedure.
Although tracking the population dose is important, there is also a clear trend to go more towards individualized patient dosimetry. Inside DOSE, a detailed patient dose passport is available. After interventional examinations of the head or trunk, the Peak Skin Dose (PSK) is automatically calculated and displayed together with a skin dose map and a complete analysis of the tube angulation. It is also possible calculate the the Size Specific Dose Estimates (SSDE) based on either the effective diameter or water equivalent diameter of the patient and thus gives more specific information on the absorbed patient dose. It is also possible to calculate organ doses after a CT exam based on different anthropomorphic phantoms, such as pediatric models, adult models with different body mass index and pregnant models. For the pregnant models, a detailed fetal dose report is available.
To do all this and to further develop the features of DOSE, research is very important for Qaelum. For example, the Peak Skin Dose mapping was experimentally validated in clinical practice. We are also working on a methodology to estimate the patient size after a general projection examination and the influence of patient (organ) dose for general x-ray imaging. Furthermore, a project to validate the filled in data of the heard of DICOM images is established. This could be very useful to see whether the different systems fill in the DICOM fields and if the filled in data is feasible."

Read the full European Medical Physics News summer issue here