Quality Assurance Applied to Digital Radiographic Equipment by Developed Software for Phantom Images

The assessment and control of image quality is a fundamental task associated with good practice to guarantee a suitable diagnosis by the radiologist. The need for image quality assessments in radiography is well established, and the use of test phantoms is a common method for this purpose. In this work we present a developed tool that consists of a specific phantom (named RACON) that is used for acceptance and constancy test in order to analyze the image obtained by digital radiographic equipment, software (named SoftRACON) for automated image analysis with digital processing techniques, and a database to store test phantom images and the scoring results.

The main objective is to characterize the constancy of the radiographic imaging chain and guarantee acceptable image quality, related to well-functioning of the radiographic equipment. Therefore, the application presented in this work is sensitive enough to the operating conditions of the radiographic digital equipment and allows the assessment of the imaging system quality and, consequently, increases the objectivity (accuracy) in the evaluation of the image.