Radiation dose and image quality optimisation in medical imaging

Abstract

Following the successful OPTIMAX summer school held in Salford, 2013, we organised another OPTIMAX summer school in Lisbon during August, 2014. Sixty six people participated,comprising PhD, MSc and BSc students as well as tutors from the 5 European partners. Professional mix was drawn from engineering, medical physics / physics, radiography and occupational therapy. The summer school was hosted by the Lisbon School of Health Technology, Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. It was funded by Erasmus,aside one additional student who was funded by Nuffield.The summer school comprised of lectures and group work in which experimental research projects were conducted in six teams. Team project focus varied, with two concentrating on iterative reconstruction (CT), one into interface pressure mapping (between human body and imaging couch) whilst the remaining three focused to determining ways to reduce dose whilst preserving image quality for different projection radiography procedures. The summer school culminated in a conference, in which each team presented two oral papers.One paper reviewed the literature on their area of interest,whilst the other considered their experimental findings. The oral papers were also presented in written format, in journal article style, and after editing they have been included within this book. At the time of editing this book, several of the experimental papers had been submitted to conferences and some lecturers have commenced development work in order to make them fit for submission to journals