Technique Charts
One of our areas of study during the first week of the summer semester is technique charts. One of my objectives this semester is to start building a reliable technique chart. In order to do this, I want to measure the thickness of some body parts that I’m imaging and record the exposure technique that goes along it whenever I come across exposures that I think are really good. This will start to give me a baseline to use whenever I’m not using automatic exposure controls. My first hurdles to this project were that no one knows for sure what the screen speeds or bucky grid ratios are at my clinical site. I discussed this with my instructor and he recommended making an assumption that we’re using 200 speed screens an 10:1 grids, which would fall in line with what’s in use at the other facilities I have be in so far. Today when I returned to clinical, I started looking for the calipers so I could measure some patients, and there are none to be found. Without those, I can’t begin to start making any real sense of techniques. I sent an email to my instructor to ask if I could borrow a set of our calipers from the lab for a couple weeks. Hopefully he’ll allow me to do that since we don’t use them in the lab. The thickness of our phantoms never change :)
I didn’t run into much of anything intriguing at clinical today. I did learn that refuse from a barium enema can smell particularly foul, especially when the patient’s large intestine was not cleaned out to an optimum level before the study was started. I had to clean up a floor in a dressing room where a patient had ’spilled’ some barium, and it about knocked me out.
I got my first precomp on a barium enema today. I’m looking forward to getting some fluoroscopy comped this semester…