Diagnostic Radiology Viva Questions

Part 1

What documents would you expect to find in a Radiology Physics department?
What is IRR 1985 applicable to?
If you went to survey a dental X-ray set, which document would be the most useful?
Is there any more recent legislation?
What does POPUMET relate to?
What parameters would you need to calculate the dose to a patient?
What are the units of radiation output?
How would you calculate the dose?
What would X-Dose give you in addition to whole-body dose?
What does a DAP meter measure?

Part 2

Can you give a brief summary of IRR99/IRMER?
What other guidance do we use for radiation protection?
How do we measure kV?
How does the KVp divider work?
Did you use mostly digital or film-screen systems during your placement?
What are the advantages of digital systems over film-screen systems? What are the disadvantages?
What is it important to test an AEC for digital systems and how do we perform an AEC test?
Describe the Leeds test object TO10? What do we use it for?
How can we analyse the results from the TO10 test object? Can you sketch the plots we would produce?
What physical tests should we perform during the QA of a mammography set?
Why is the displayed breast thickness important?
Why do we use compression for mammography?
How do can measure focal spot size in mammography?
Which method of measuring focal spot size did you prefer?
In your portfolio you include a plot of scatter fraction with angle, did you test this relationship during your placement?
Did you use the relationship between scatter fraction and angle to perform any calculations?
Give a brief explanation of your project into dose reduction methods in paediatrics?
Why do we perform dose audits?
What would you need to consider if you wanted to conduct a project which involved exposing volunteers to ionising radiation?

Part 3

Describe the main applications of each of the main imaging modalities.
Give ballpark figures for the resolution of each of the main imaging modalities.
How are CT images reconstructed?
How would you explain the effect of the width of a smoothing kernel in terms of spatial frequency? i.e. would a wide smoothing kernel effect the low or high spatial frequencies in an image?
Why do higher kV images have more noise?
What do you mean by statistical fluctuations in an image?
What factors affect the resolution of an x-ray image?
Why do we add copper filters to an x-ray beam?
What is the effect of adding copper filters on the x-ray image quality?
How useful do you think the software you used was? Discuss the errors of the software (project work)
What range of contrast levels does the CDRAD test object mimic clinically? (project)
What does DICOM stand for? What is a DICOM image, what information is contained within the image header?

Part 4

What are, the main pieces of legislation relevant to diagnostic radiology (IRR1999, IR(ME)R2000). Also know about ICRP60 and PM77/HSG226.
Who do they apply to/concern?
If we imagine installing a new radiology room, what would be involved in the planning stage? (Radiation shielding calculations, occupancy factors, workload, dose constraints, BJR/IPEM guidance etc).
Asked about my radiation-shielding project in my portfolio.
What would happen next? (critical exam)
Whose responsibility is this?
What would be necessary after this? (Acceptance and commissioning) and why?
Who would be responsible for this and who would be present?
What tests would be carried out?
How would you find what filtration was in the beam (HVL measurement etc).
Where would you look up the filtration and what data would you need to know?
How much filtration should there be in the beam?
How much filtration should there be for a dental x-ray set?
Where would you look this up?
What is the filtration for?
How would you test a fluoroscopy unit?
What is the Automatic Brightness Control?
Why is it needed? (Varying attenuation as II moved across the patient)
How does it change with varying patient thickness?
How would you test this?
What is a ballpark figure for a typical II input dose rate?
Describe a test object used? (18FG, TO20 etc)
What does it measure (Spatial resolution, low contrast details, monitor set-up and distortion)
Are the same exposure conditions used for the previous mentioned 18FG tests?