ABSTRACT
Medical Physicists may find themselves entrusted with the daunting task of estimating the absorbed dose to a patient that has undergone a complex image-guided intervention consisting of hundreds of separate and different x-ray exposures. To allow for systematic and non-proprietary access to exam-specific exposure settings, the US National Electrical Manufacturers Association has introduced diagnostic x-ray radiation dose structured reporting (RDSR); this is required to be supported on newly manufactured x-ray units. This RDSR data can be used as a basis for calculating organ doses, in combination with a patient model. However, RDSR data does not specify all the information required for dose calculations; the position of the patient on the table is unknown. This chapter demonstrates a validated approach for relating the x-ray system to patient anatomy. Stylized phantoms are one variety of patient model, based on mathematical representations of patient organs. Since such an approach can be implemented in a MATLAB code without having to rely on the import of a computational phantom, ray tracing for a stylized phantom has been chosen as a demonstrative example. The next step would be to incorporate a dose calculation method, such as a Monte Carlo simulation; the reader is pointed to references to explore this further.
