Database Design Project: DICOM Database for Radiation Tracking

This project outlines the design of an automated DICOM database system for radiation dose tracking and quality monitoring in healthcare facilities. The system aims to address the challenges of managing complex medical and clinical data related to radiation exposure from procedures such as X-rays and CT scans. The project includes an introduction to the problem of radiation dose control, the project objectives such as analyzing requirements and developing a relational model, and a description of the users and information involved. The database process planning involves the development of a "DICOM Index Tracker" to capture DICOM tags and the implementation of a database administration system for dose calculations, along with a web interface for real-time access and automated alerts via email, text, and pagers. The significance of the system lies in its ability to improve radiation dose monitoring and quality measures by providing automatic alerts to medical professionals. The project references relevant literature and highlights the potential of this automated system to enhance the usability of conventional DICOM systems.

Running head: DATABASE DESIGN PROJECT
Database Design Project
DICOM Database for Automated Radiation Dose Tracking and Quality monitoring
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Introduction
In any healthcare facility radiation based diagnosis procedures are used such as X-ray,
CT scan, MRI, nuclear medicine and ultrasound. Imbalanced and high dosage of these
radiological diagnoses procedure could have several major and minor impacts on the patients
(Larson et al. 2013). Hence, every healthcare organization has their own controlling system to
measure the doses to minimize overdose.
Problem Statement
As per the regulation state regulatory bodies and by The Joint Commission in the US
it is the chief criteria for any healthcare facility to have a controlled system for quality
assurance (QA) monitoring of ionizing radiation use with certain diagnostic procedures
(Garrido et al. 2013). However, this monitoring and controlling systems sometime become
very complicated due to complex interconnection between various medical and clinical
procedures and dataset (Wang et al., 2013). Hence, it would be very helpful if a automated
database system could be developed for knowledge management and quality assurance.
Project Objectives
To develop an automated database system successfully the following objectives have to
be considered as milestones
 Analyzing the requirement for data processing and knowledge management
procedures in ionizing radiation controlling
 Forming a database relational concept model for automated DICOM data
management
 Developing implementable database architecture model of Automated DBMS for
ionizing radiation and controlling

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 Assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of the new Automated DICOM database
model for further improvement and upgrading
Description of users and Information
This automated DICOM database management system will be govern by the clinical
administration. The end users will be the caregivers, medical practitioners, radiologist and
radiotherapist who will input the patient record including dosage. The information that this
database system operates are the DICOM Index record, patient details, diagnosis report,
medical details. This information will be processed to develop the final ionizing radiation and
controlling report.
Database process planning
The “DICOM Index Tracker©” (DIT) will be developed to capture the desired digital
imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) tags from CT, nuclear imaging
equipment, and other DICOM devices facilitated across the healthcare organization. The new
Automated DIT database system will be equipped with the database administration system
that will calculate the records through the American Association of Physicists in Medicine
recommended dose calculation process. On the other hand, web interface will be provided for
real-time access to the database. The automated system will record, monitor, and provide
automatic alerts to medical professionals of excursions according to the trigger action levels
of radiation from the automated database determined internally. Automatic alerts will be
provided to the healthcare staffs through email, cell phone text message as well as internal
pager text messaging.
Significance and conclusion
The core purpose of this system will be to provide automatic alerts to medical
professionals for ensuring the quality monitoring in radiation dosage. This automated

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database management system will extend the usability of conventional DICOM system to a
automated data processing system that will improve the radiation dose as well as other quality
measures.

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References
Garrido, T., Kumar, S., Lekas, J., Lindberg, M., Kadiyala, D., Whippy, A., ... & Weissberg, J.
(2013). e-Measures: insight into the challenges and opportunities of automating
publicly reported quality measures. Journal of the American Medical Informatics
Association, 21(1), 181-184.
Larson, D. B., Wang, L. L., Podberesky, D. J., & Goske, M. J. (2013). System for verifiable
CT radiation dose optimization based on image quality. Part I. Optimization
model. Radiology, 269(1), 167-176.
Wang, S., Pavlicek, W., Roberts, C. C., Langer, S. G., Zhang, M., Hu, M., ... & Wu, T.
(2013). An automated DICOM database capable of arbitrary data mining (including
radiation dose indicators) for quality monitoring. Journal of digital imaging, 24(6),
223-233.