Optimising image quality for medical imaging

OPTIMAX 2016 was held at the University of Salford in Greater Manchester. It is the fourth summer school of OPTIMAX with other renditions having been organized at the University of Salford (2013), ESTeSL, Lisbon (2014) and Hanze UAS, Groningen (2015). For OPTIMAX 2016, 72 people participated from eleven countries, comprising PhD, MSc and BSc students as well as tutors from the seven European partner universities. Professional mix was drawn from engineering, medical physics/ physics and radiography. OPTIMAX 2016 was partly funded by the partner universities and partly by the participants. Two students from South Africa and two from Brazil were invited by Hanze UAS (Groningen) and ESTeSL (Lisbon). One student from the United Kingdom was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The summer school included lectures and group projects in which experimental research was conducted in five teams. Each team project focus varied and included: optimization of full spine curvature radiography in paediatrics; ultrasound assessment of muscle thickness and muscle cross-sectional area: a reliability study; the Influence of Source-to-Image Distance on Effective Dose and Image Quality for Mobile Chest X-rays; Impact of the anode heel effect on image quality and effective dose for AP Pelvis: A pilot study; and the impact of pitch values on Image Quality and radiation dose in an abdominal adult phantom using CT. OPTIMAX 2016 culminated in a poster session and a conference, in which the research teams presented their posters and oral presentations. This book comprises of two sections, the first four chapters concern generic background information which has value to summer school organization and also theory on which the research projects were built. The second section contains the research papers in written format. The research papers have been accepted for the ECR conference, Vienna, 2017 as either oral presentations or posters.