CAN THE SIZE-SPECIFIC DOSE ESTIMATE BE DERIVED FROM THE BODY MASS INDEX? A FEASIBILITY STUDY

Size-specific dose estimate ([Formula: see text]) index appears to be more suitable than the commonly used volume computed tomography dose index ([Formula: see text]) to estimate the dose delivered to the patient during a computed tomography (CT) scan. We evaluated whether an [Formula: see text] can be determined from the patient’s body mass index ([Formula: see text]) with sufficient reliability in the case that a [Formula: see text] is not given by the CT scanner. For each of the three most used examination types, CT examinations of 50 female and 50 male patients were analyzed. The [Formula: see text] values automatically provided by the scanner were compared with [Formula: see text] determined from [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. A good accordance of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] was found for the chest and abdominal regions. A low correlation was observed for the head region. The presented method is a simple and practically useful surrogate approach for the chest and abdominal regions but not for the head.