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The purpose of this report is (1) to summarize the current state of the art in estimating organ doses from CT examinations and (2) to outline a road map for standardized reporting of essential parameters necessary for estimation of organ doses from CT imaging in the DICOM standard. To address these purposes, the report includes a comprehensive discussion of (1) the various metrics, concepts, and methods that may be used to achieve estimates of patient organ dose and (2) the DICOM standard for CT.

This Joint Report of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Task Group 246 and the European Federation of Organizations for Medical Physics (EFOMP) contains three major sections and an appendix. Section 2 (with additional material in the appendix) provides a review of basic CT dosimetry metrics, their uses and limitations in the context of organ dosimetry, and the DICOM information currently associated with parameters that affect CT dose metrics and, consequently, organ dose estimates. Section 3 provides an overview of present and emerging organ dose estimation methods reported in the literature, e.g., for the lens of the eye, breast tissue, colon, and skin. Finally, the report concludes with section 4, which provides a discussion on the sources and magnitudes of uncertainty for different organ dose estimation methods.

Ongoing efforts to facilitate routine standardized estimation of patient organ doses from CT are dependent, in large part, on the availability of the DICOM Radiation Dose Structured Report (RDSR), which provides a host of information pertinent to radiation dose calculations. This report, therefore, includes detailed information on DICOM header content in CT images and how it can be used in organ dose estimation. The RDSR markedly expands the abilities of the clinical medical physicist to estimate doses at the patient, device, and protocol level