Click here to

Session: Best of Professional [Return to Session]

Facilitating MRI Protocol Standardization and Creating a Protocol Website with An In-House Automated Software

E Eastman*, N Binesh, A Scott, Y Zhou, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA

Presentations

MO-C930-BOP-F1-2 (Monday, 7/11/2022) 9:30 AM - 10:00 AM [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]

Exhibit Hall | Forum 1

Purpose: In recent years, computed tomography (CT) protocol review has received attention from researchers in response to mandates by The Joint Commission and the American College of Radiology. While Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has often been excluded from this effort, standardizing MRI protocols through protocol review is necessary to produce consistent quality images across an institution. With more than 300 protocols on each scanner at our institution, parsing each protocol is a laborious and time-consuming task. The purpose of this project was to develop an automated software solution that would facilitate an efficient MRI protocol review process by extracting 14 unique parameters from each protocol and load them into a database that could be instantaneously updated and accessed by individuals across the institution.

Methods: Most scanners allow users to export the protocol tree as a file. The 14 parameters deemed most critical for radiologist review were extracted by the software. The software writes protocols to a database, and automatically populates an intranet website with the output.

Results: We estimate that using the software has saved our institution approximately 26 hours of time per scanner compared to manual parsing and recoding of the relevant parameters. Previously, protocols had to be printed out from one scanner and compared to another. Now, the entire imaging team has access via the protocol website, allowing the MRI team to keep the sequences and parameters consistent across all scanners.

Conclusion: The software makes MRI protocol review attainable and enables instantaneous access to protocols by multiple members of an institution with little effort. Radiologists can now easily view the main parameters of a protocol, making it easy for them to select the best protocol for their orders and identify changes needed for special cases.

Keywords

Not Applicable / None Entered.

Taxonomy

Not Applicable / None Entered.

Contact Email

Share: