Albany, NY – (April 15, 2012) VirtualDose™CT, the product of many years of “virtual patient” research funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy, received a flurry of media attention this spring that brought the technology to the attention of the general public for the first time.
A Wall Street Journal article and video in December were soon followed by stories in U.S. News and World Reports, MedicalPhysicsWeb, MedicalXpress, DailyRx Relevant Health News, MyhealthNewsDaily, SciGuru, and Science News, as well as foreign journals. What particularly caught the public’s attention was the idea that obese people are getting exposed to more radiation when they receive CT scans.
Thanks to the virtual patient technology embodied in VirtualDoseCT, this long-standing problem can now be addressed. It solves the radiologist’s need for accurate x-ray CT radiation dose tracking and reporting by providing anatomically correct 3D patient modeling. The Web-based solution revolutionizes the way organ doses are calculated for health physics applications. Using a well-tested family of anatomically correct phantoms, revolutionary GPU-based Monte Carlo simulation, and innovative Software as a Service (SaaS) programming techniques, it permits radiation health professionals to obtain highly accurate images with less radiation.
VirtualDoseCT was developed under a strategic consortium with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Florida (UF) using their “virtual patients” technologies derived from research activities previously funded by NIH and other agencies. The overall goal of this project has been to develop VirtualDoseCT for radiologists, radiological technologists, medical physicists, regulators, manufacturers and researchers who need to calculate and analyze patient radiation doses from x-ray computed tomography (CT) examinations. solves the need for accurate CT X-ray radiation dose tracking and reporting by providing anatomically correct 3D patient modeling.
The Web-based solution will be deployed in beta trials at 10 major U.S. hospitals later this year before being made commercially available in 2013.
Virtual Phantoms, Inc. was founded in 2009 by faculty members from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in collaboration with the University of Florida, using the “Virtual Patient technologies developed from nearly 20 years research at RPI and UF in the field of nuclear and radiological engineering. Combining a large collection of anatomically accurate models of patients of various ages and sizes and sophisticated “Monte Carlo” simulation methods originally developed for nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos in the 1940s, VPI is recognized as a world leader in the modeling of ionizing radiation, radiation safety, and medical/occupational radiation dosimetry.
