Is the obesity of patients affecting your x-ray procedures?

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Mohamed Refaey on January 20, 2011 at 11:46am

extremely obese patients make the examination difficult for technologists, specially in chest and LSS examinations.

they have to retake and even to double the doses, which is harmful for both the patient and the tube.

 

the obesity is not just affecting x-ray examinations, it's degrading the quality of ultrasound, CT and even MRI.

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Permalink Reply by Adam on February 21, 2011 at 1:12pm

Dr. Refaey-

Do you feel having a better x-ray cassette holder that is more versatile and accomodating to obese patients would help to lower the number of retakes and/or dosage levels?

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Permalink Reply by Patrocinio B. Flores Jr. on February 1, 2011 at 1:13am

There should be a specialized type of procedure should the ratio of obese patients increased. I agree that both technologist and patient may experienced difficulties due to re-takes cause by factoring techniques and positioning.

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Permalink Reply by Robin R.T.(R) on March 7, 2011 at 2:17pm

Patient obesity definitely has an adverse effect on exam quality, as well as patient dose. In my facility, we are more and more frequently requested to perform portable abdomen studies on patients over 400 lbs. It is difficult to place the cassette underneath these patients, and the patients' size often requires more than one exposure to image the area of interest. We use CR, and abdomen studies for patients of this size are often grainy and minimally diagnostic. The same is true of L-spine and chest procedures, as mentioned by Dr. Refaey. Our facility is currently shopping around for some new x-ray equipment, and it seems many companies are offering digital detectors that are 17" x 17" in size, since that is currently the largest a detector can be and still fit into a standard bucky. I imagine in the future we will see even larger devices, perhaps 20" x 20".

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