Radiation Dose
NCCPM hosts a website to record MGDs for medical physicists offering services to the UK Breast Screening Programmes as part of the equipment database.
Measuring the mean glandular dose (MGD) to the standard breast has for many years been the main means of assessing the doses from mammographic systems. Although this is a valuable and simple approach to dose measurement it provides limited information on the doses received by individual women. Consequently the periodic measurement of doses for samples of women undergoing mammographic examinations is recommended. NCCPM have ran a number of national dose surveys every 3 years since 1998 (see publications).
NCCPM hosts a website to record MGDs for medical physicists offering services to the UK Breast Screening Programmes as part of the equipment database.
Software to Extract Patient Dose
- New software to extract patient dose is available here
- A draft user guide is available here:
New Dose Model
The current doses are based on methods Developed by Prof David Dance. There is now an alternative dose model published by Sechopoulos et al (Med Phys 2023) as part of the AAPM TG282/ EFOMP Working Group. The NCCPM equipment database will calculate doses for Dance and TG282 models. NCCPM hosts a dose calculator for TG282 on:
https://medphys.royalsurrey.nhs.uk/TG282doseCalculator
Dose database: Microsoft Access (no longer supported)
NCCPM previously supplied versions of a MGD calculator using Microsoft Access for undertaking dose surveys. This database only calculates MGD using the Dance model. There have been many versions of this software and the final version is 2.9. We recommend that UK users use the online dose calculator. Others may want to use the access version:
NHSBSP-Breast-Dose-Software-Version-2.9.accdb
Breast dose software instruction manual V2.9.pdf
Users will need to ensure that the calculator works as it should, NCCPM will not give any help in its use.
