This is not to say that one ought not use commercial grade monitors for clinical review, rather, if used for diagnostic purposes, one needs to make sure that they are properly calibrated and meet the requirements for diagnostic viewing. The question is, what are these requirements?
There are actually two sets of guidelines, one from the American College of Radiology (ACR) and one from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). Unfortunately, each group’s guidelines are slightly different, hard to interpret, and leave out some basic requirements such as stability and the capability for calibration and the requirement for accessing the calibration information. The latter is critical from a liability perspective.
As an example of the latter, I recently talked with a PACS administrator who was required to show the calibration records of a particular monitor that was used three years ago for a diagnosis that was later questioned in court. He had to prove that the monitor was within calibration at that time. Another example where the access to calibration data might be important is when the reading is done at a remote site, which does not have a person responsible for the image quality and integrity, so that the proper calibration can be verified and managed remotely.
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