Statistical analysis to establish the relationship between radiation consumption and energy use for medical X-rays

Abstract

Ways to determine how much radiation is actually used to produce an X-ray image have not been developed and this is an essential step for a complete life-cycle analysis (LCA) of medical imaging procedures. The work presented here was an exploration of a statistical method, based on image processing, of an actual X-ray image to determine how much radiation was used to create that image. The X-ray source, the interaction of the X-ray photons from source to target, and the interaction between photons and soft and hard tissue were simulated. An estimation of how much radiation was produced, and how much radiation was used was obtained. Also, the level of radiation absorbed by the patient was described here by using a correlation function between a non-filtered X-ray image and a filtered X-ray image. The complete work described in this paper presents basis towards a complete LCA on radiology imaging procedures.