The first 2021 meeting of the SPR Radiological Protection Study Group was held on February 8th. The person responsible for conducting the online meeting was the Diagnostic Specialist Physician at ABFM, Felipe Favaro Capeleti, from GMP – Consultancy in Radioprotection and Medical Physics Ltd. and University of Medical Sciences of Santa Casa of São Paulo.

The topic covered was “Fundamentals of Automatic Exposure Control in Tomography”. During the presentation, Felipe explained that each case is unique and that the choices of actions that must be taken depend from patient to patient.

As it is a recent issue, many x-ray machines still don’t have this automatic control, but over time there will be the development of them, including tomography equipment, so that there is this adjustment.

According to him, the fundamentals of automatic exposure control are:

• Programming by the manufacturer to stop the x-ray firing automatically;
• Image receiver response when there is an adequate radiation level for a given patient;
• Single exposure;
• Flat image;
• 3 to 5 photocells – used separately or in combination.

Therefore, the automatic exposure control adapts the current values to the patient’s size – always thinking about the appropriate noise level so as not to disturb the image quality.

Watch the full video of the class at: