Right Dose Portfolio OverviewRight Approach to Radiation Dose Management

The Right Dose Technology includes a comprehensive scope of imaging modalities, applications and system services to manage and reduce radiation dose.

The Right Dose Management hardware fleet covers the full range of imaging modalities – from hybrid systems to women’s health diagnostics – and is specifically designed to deliver maximum image quality with minimum dose. The software portfolio helps you derive maximum information from a medical image while managing dose and keeping it at a sensible minimum for patients and staff.

These are just some of the many highlights.

Find out information about the Artis Q.zen product line for interventional imaging and software tools designed to enhance image quality and save dose.

The Artis Q.zen product line for interventional imaging is a visionary breakthrough in X-ray detection with unique sensitivity enabling ultra-low dose imaging. It takes performance in X-ray generation and precision to the next level.

CARE+CLEAR depicts a portfolio of software tools designed to enhance image quality and save dose. They are all based on the belief, that every patient and every clinical case is different. Only the user should decide on the image quality needed, and then determine the lowest possible dose. CAREfilter, CAREposition and CAREguard are outstanding examples of software-based applications that benefit dose saving and dose monitoring in the angiography suite.

The SOMATOM^® Force allows for a dose reduction of up to 50% less than today’s leading CT systems. CARE Dose4D, CARE kV, and the Advanced Modeled Iterative Reconstruction ADMIRE¹ make up a comprehensive dose reduction and dose management portfolio, enabling the perfect dose level to deliver the best possible image quality.

The MAMMOMAT Revelation with the unique Siemens Healthineers PRIME Technology² offers up to 30% less dose³ and uncompromised image quality in Women‘s Health diagnostics.

The CARE program combines a variety of cutting-edge applications that reduce radiation dose to patients and staff. As a result, image quality is maintained while reducing dose.

Learn more about innovation technology in molecular imaging.

The PET/CT imaging scanner Biograph mCT offers innovative solutions that allow the lowest dose to be administered, while still scanning patients faster than ever before. Now clinicians can have scans with half the dose and double the speed and by reducing dose and increasing speed, patient safety and utilization are improved while costs are dramatically reduced.

One of the key trends in nuclear medicine has been the ever-increasing demand for faster myocardial perfusion imaging. Historically, image quality has been limited by the number of detected photons. Siemens IQ•SPECT is the only technology today that performs ultra-fast cardiac imaging with a general purpose camera. With IQ•SPECT, physicians can perform a myocardial perfusion imaging study in approximately 4 minutes using the standard dose, 8 minutes using half the standard dose or 16 minutes using one-quarter of the standard dose.

Surrounded each day by a variety of challenges –patients, staff, technology, and legal – healthcare professionals need to be sure they get the best support available. This drives the ever-increasing demand for high-quality services and care in the competitive healthcare sector.

With Siemens Performance Plans we attempt to free you from technical worries and we tailor service contracts to your-specific needs.

Reducing downtime to an absolute minimum and taking extra care of specific components that are essential to a patient-sensitive emission of radiation dos, e.g. the X-ray tube, are a fundamental part of the Siemens Performance Plans service offering strategy. Having a Siemens service contract means having the right assets in the right place and at the right time – a crucial factor when fostering your institution’s reputation as a place of care where radiation dose sensitivity is at the top of the agenda.

Live, real-time, and remote: The Siemens Guardian Program ensures your systems’ uninterrupted performance by proactively monitoring for deviations from current norms, making it possible to detect and resolve system errors before malfunctions occur.

TubeGuard predicts possible tube failures in dedicated computed tomography and molecular imaging systems. As the essential dose-emitting piece of technology, the X-ray tube should is protected by design at all times from possible failures. In the unlikely event of a failure or malfunction nonetheless, TubeGuard can predict these kinds of events and spare users from actually emitting patient harming levels of radiation dose. Systems with components in question are automatically shut down until a safe level of operation can be fully restored and maintained.

The Siemens Evolve Program is a dedicated investment protection program that enables imaging systems to operate at top performance levels throughout their entire life-span. With the Evolve Program integrated with a service agreement we can take care of pending upgrades, all installation processes, and necessary trainings.

With system updates and upgraded across entire organizations and for multiple modalities, you can always provide the latest medical technology available, also ensuring patient safety and an unbeatable reputation for quality, innovation and efficiency. In terms of dose technology, this program enables access to the latest dose saving technology even many years after initial equipment purchase. As an innovation leader in dose technology, it is only natural that Siemens technology evolves frequently. With the Evolve Program you can rest assured that your systems are always automatically up to date when it comes to new developments in hardware, software and components.

With Siemens Options & Upgrades offerings you can extend your system’s lifetime and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), improve process efficiency and optimize asset utilization, broaden your clinical spectrum and create additional revenue streams. So you can differentiate from your competition – with industry-leading features.

Here you can find only an extent of Options & Upgrades offerings to effective manage and reduce dose in different modalities.

The Low-dose syngo DynaCT protocol achieves acceptable image quality at lowest possible dose values in a lot of cases (Figure 69). This protocol is for radiosensitive patients, such as pediatric patients, and provides adequate diagnostic image quality. In clinical practice, the balance between image quality and dose has to be considered.

(Sinogram Affirmed Iterative Reconstruction) finally made it possible to benefit from iterative reconstruction with a dose reduction potential of up to 60%² in clinical routine, even in environments where time is crucial, such as acute care.

TrueV increases the amount of detector material and extends the field of view (FoV) of the PET detectors in the z-direction of the patient in order to capture more information for the same amount of activity.

The Biograph family of PET/CT systems possesses a feature, called TrueV, that is directly aimed at dose reduction. TrueV increases the amount of detector material and extends the field of view (FoV) of the PET detectors in the z-direction of the patient in order to capture more information for the same amount of activity. Biograph PET/CT systems employ 3D acquisition technology. By applying this method, any extension of the field of view leads to tremendous benefits in data acquisition. Increasing the field of view by 34.8% yields an improvement in sensitivity and count-rate performance of about 77%. With TrueV the injected dose to the patient can be reduced while keeping all the other scan parameters the same, and image quality is maintained.

Maximize the potential of your Siemens system with an Asset Planning Session.

Asset Planning Sessions are designed to help you address challenges in your organization by identifying potential gaps between what the market is doing, what you are doing currently, and your strategic goals. By aligning your assets to your strategy, this invaluable tool allows you to identify the potential for reducing cost and increasing revenues with your existing equipment fleet.

Find further information here.

Analytics Tools for data management can help users comply with regulations. Different organizations and regulatory bodies create rules, directives and legislation. They force institutions to monitor and report radiation dose values and to raise their commitment so that the right amount of radiation will be applied by everybody. The Council of the European Union and the Joint Commission revised requirements for diagnostic imaging standards. Organizations strive to fulfill such requirements while still focusing on core objectives.

teamplay is a cloud-based network that brings together healthcare professionals in order to advance medicine and human health as a team effort. 

Be it an institution, hospital chain, or integrated delivery network, transparency of performance is key to its success. teamplay brings this transparency to the imaging fleet. With its built-in multi-vendor support, it grants instant⁴ access to fleet statistics. And more crucially, it empowers healthcare professionals to identify improvement potential on all levels of execution. Imaging fleet management is an essential aspect of the teamplay ecosystem, which offers an array of applications for both stakeholders and the professionals working directly with the imaging fleet itself. From devices and protocols to participating team members, teamplay provides precise starting points for enhancing efficiency, competitiveness and quality of care. teamplay gives an easy-to grasp overview of an institution’s imaging workflow in one intuitive and smooth Plug & Play solution.

Focus on essentials       

• The Home screen was developed to help you get the most out of your imaging data in a minimum of time.
• Form follows function with a clear focus on transparency and efficiency.
• Clean and tidy grids make interacting with your key metrics fast and convenient.

Streamline your workflow

• The teamplay user interface puts imaging fleet performance and optimization front and center.
• Each application helps you tackle a specific task in imaging fleet management.
• The Home screen connects you to all teamplay offerings, from current to future applications. 

Compare and collaborate

• The teamplay Home screen not only gives you access to your imaging metrics but provides a platform to compare with others.
• Compare KPIs⁵ in worldwide virtual imaging team.
• Benchmarking^5,6 straight from your Home screen. 

Monitor dose levels

• Dose analytics helps you identify areas of improvement and best-practice exams.
• All insights in teamplay Dose are based on data extracted from the radiation reports of your scanners.
• To analyze findings, focus on time frames, dose amount, and entity of interest, such as scanner, exam type, operator or location.

Identify what causes outliers

• Current dose levels as well as deviations from both institutional and national reference levels are displayed front and center on your Home screen.
• Exams that have exceeded specific dose levels are detailed on the Dose Events page.
• To explore the root causes of these dose outliers, track details down to modality, body region, operator, location, and exam type.

Protocols in one place

• Protocols⁷ gives you a clear picture of protocols installed in your imaging fleet. Tidy, interactive grids make exploring protocols as easy as a tapping on your tablet.
• Find imaging protocols in one place. The viewer lets you analyze their details.
• Focus on a particular scanner (CT) in your fleet, and browse its protocol tree.

Analyzing and optimizing

• The challenges for your imaging fleet change over time, and so do protocols. teamplay makes it easy to identify best-practice protocols and use them to optimize your workflow.
• To keep track of recent improvements, simply explore the version history.
• Add annotations for later reference, and distribute protocols with accompanying notes.

Streamline protocol roll-outs

• Send particularly efficient protocols to compatible scanners in your fleet, straight from your distribution panel⁵.
• Save time and resources in your fleet network by distributing protocols remotely.

Dose monitoring with teamplay

teamplay Dose is a quality-oriented radiation dose monitoring application and a cloud-based network that provides features and tools to manage and optimize radiation dose in day-to-day operation. teamplay is multivendor capable and able to handle data from numerous modalities.

Integration in users’ environment

teamplay integrates easily with the users’ environment, aggregates data, and displays data in a meaningful way to derive conclusions. The application uses a locally installed component (within the IT infrastructure) - the teamplay Receiver - to communicate with the PACS system. The teamplay Receiver is capable of querying the PACS system for DICOM radiation dose structured reports (RDSR), and is also designed to receive such standard DICOM objects directly from a modality.

Data source

Radiation dose data is derived from RDSRs, the DICOM standard for capturing dose data in the healthcare environment. teamplay Dose is also capable of deriving data from patient protocols (black images), an additional method of capturing data. The amount of data derived from patient protocol is limited compared to RDSR. Based on the configuration of the locally installed teamplay Receiver, a certain amount of data is submitted to the teamplay central cloud data base. The exact content of the data can be configured, and is based on the data privacy settings of the user.

Challenges for reducing radiation dose

Users strive to reduce radiation dose in a continuous process while maintaining diagnostic image quality. They need to be able to identify root cause for high dose events and best practices for low dose examinations to apply and replicate those in standard procedures. teamplay Dose provides the tools to identify high dose events and enables users to investigate and ultimately address the root causes.

teamplay Dose events

teamplay Dose can be set up to inform users about dose events. There are two types of dose events provided in teamplay Dose. As a first category of dose events, teamplay Dose is able to track examinations that exceed thresholds (DRL, dose reference level) that are put in place by national authorities. Such thresholds are being provided by the application based on the country settings during teamplay Receiver installation. The second type of event is triggered when a user-defined threshold has been exceeded. Such thresholds can be managed in teamplay Dose specific to modality and exam type. teamplay Dose provides a dedicated area for the user to manage the internal dose thresholds in multiple levels, from body region down to exam types.

CARE Analytics is a non-medical, free-of-charge tool that can be installed on any computer and is designed to improve dose monitoring in interventional imaging, computed tomography, radiography, fluoroscopy and urology, even a multi vendor approach is possible. The increased monitoring leads to increased transparency and helps to improve daily work practices by adjusting work protocols. With this information, it was not only intended to support daily decisions about dose application, but also to assist in better explaining medical imaging procedures to patients who are increasingly knowledgeable about medical imaging.

CARE Analytics supports DICOM Structured Reports from the following modalities:

• Computed Tomography
• Angiography
• Radiography
• Fluoroscopy
• Urology

CARE Analytics allows evaluating the delivered patient dose with regards to:

• Enhanced in-house dose reporting and assessment
• Enhanced transparency regarding dose per case
• Improved reporting on patient dose history
• Improved cross-institutional reporting

With a multiplicity of radiology devices from Siemens, the dose received by each individual patient is recorded in DICOM structured dose reports – DICOM SR. The relevant data in these files comprises information such as CT Dose Index (CTDIvol), dose length product (DLP), total recording time, and the dose area product. Until now, this data has merely been archived but was not further processed. With CARE Analytics the relevant information is presented in a table format for further analysis, e.g. statistical reports of dose data and related parameters. Using data edited in this way, the dose given during different examinations and the dose a patient has received on different imaging systems can be compared. Dose reporting between multiple hospitals is also possible. The increased transparency helps to improve the daily workflow and allows for additional dose saving.

The Right Dose Consulting, Training and Education Offerings are developed to help you and your staff to fully exploit the capabilities of Siemens dose-sensitive and dose-reducing technology and achieve maximum efficiency in you clinical routine.

Our Right Dose Service Offerings are included within the Siemens Healthcare Customer Care Program and add to our company’s portfolio of dose-sensitive and dose-reducing technology. For more information about our Siemens Healthcare Customer Care Program offerings, please visit our Customer Service website.

Education Services

Education Plans are developed to help you and your staff to fully exploit the capabilities of our Siemens Healthineers medical equipment and achieve maximum efficiency in the clinical routine. Benefit from keeping your staff’s expertise and equipment on a high level with a long-term perspective and a close eye on recent developments and new requirements.

Siemens has developed a comprehensive program with a holistic approach to help lower dose. Optimize CARE is a dose optimization program that provides expert insights, methods, and tools which help users of dose emitting technology develop a customized roadmap for improving their dose performance.

CRADLE – stands for Contrast Reducing Analysis Decreasing Load & Expenses. This comprehensive consultancy program advances and optimizes medication safety and dose management. Your patients get the appropriate contrast media dose per CT examination, adapted to their individual medical condition, without compromising on image quality.

With Siemens Options & Upgrades you can keep them state of the art and stay competitive – expanding your clinical capabilities and reducing total cost of ownership. Here you can find only a extend of Options and Upgrade highlights:

Maximize the potential of your Siemens system with an Asset Planning Session.

What is an Asset Planning Session all about and why does it make sense to engage in one?

Our Asset Planning Session helps identify areas and means to extend the life of your installed systems and plan your investments accordingly. Resulting from this discussion we will create a scalable and personalized Asset Management Plan that aligns to your organization‘s size, overall business and clinical strategy.