The Assessment of Dose and Image Quality of Storage Phosphor Systems: An Overview of the Different Tasks

The assessment of the dose-image quality relation using storage phosphor systems requires a series of tasks. In the text, the main aspects are summarised and the differences with the measurements for X ray equipment using film-screen cassettes are indicated. Standards of testing are becoming available for quality control measurements of the equipment. The global analysis is, however, less standardised. Large scale trials concerning dose and image quality are missing. In particular, guidelines about the appropriate use of post processing parameters and image visualisation are scarce. In this regard, a newly proposed method to evaluate image quality as a function of post-processing parameters for particular types of clinical images is mentioned. It is concluded that a thorough analysis may be very time consuming, but if the properties of the digital detectors are exploited, many tasks can be automated. (author)