Platform & software · Radiation dose monitoring

Radiation dose monitoring software compared with dose tracking and radiation dose management systems

The short answer

Radiation dose monitoring software collects the radiation dose your imaging equipment reports, stores it against the patient and the protocol, and flags exams that fall outside your expected range. It is bought to satisfy three separate obligations: recording dose in the patient record, identifying dose outliers and benchmarking against peers, and producing the report your state or accrediting body asks for. The buying question most departments get wrong is regulatory status. A search of the FDA 510(k) database on September 15, 2026 returns zero clearances for Radimetrics, DoseWatch, DoseTrack, DoseMonitor, Imalogix and teamplay. That is not an oversight. This category sits under 21 CFR 880.6310, the Medical Device Data System rule, product code OUG, which is Class I, and Imalogix is registered there. So clearance cannot separate these vendors, and the things that actually can are which dose data sources the product reads, whether it handles your older scanners, and what it costs.

Dose monitoring gets bought on a demo and regretted at the first audit. The demo always looks the same: a dashboard of CTDIvol by protocol, a red row where somebody scanned a child on an adult setting, a quarterly comparison against a national median. Every product in this category can draw that screen.

What separates them is upstream of the dashboard, in whether the dose data arrives at all. Modern scanners emit a DICOM Radiation Dose Structured Report, which is a clean machine-readable record of what was delivered. Most CT scanners built since around 2012 produce one. Older units, and a good deal of fluoroscopy and interventional equipment, do not. They produce a dose screen as a secondary capture image, which is a picture of a number, and getting that into a database means optical character recognition and a tolerance for error. A department with a mixed fleet is buying an extraction problem, not a dashboard.

The second thing that separates them is the obligation you are actually trying to meet, because there are several and they do not overlap neatly. California has required since July 1, 2012 that the dose be recorded on every diagnostic CT study in the patient's record, and that the interpretive report either state the dose or have the protocol page attached to it. The Joint Commission requires CT dose documentation in the clinical record along with identification of dose incidents and external benchmarking. Medicare's XR-29 provision under PAMA is about the scanner's own capabilities rather than your software. The ACR Dose Index Registry is voluntary benchmarking you opt into. A product can serve one of these well and the others barely at all.

This page is a buyer's guide to that category. Radiological.ai is not a dose monitoring system and does not collect dose data. The one place the two genuinely touch is the California requirement that the dose appear in the interpretive report, because getting a number reliably into signed report text is a structured reporting problem, and that is the part we work on.

The Reading Station

Assistant ready

Worklist

Not for diagnostic use

Structured report

Draft

Run the assistant to draft this report for review.

You review & sign

Decision support. The radiologist reviews and signs every study.

Drafted in · you review & sign Worklist re-prioritized

Decision support for qualified clinicians. Radiological.ai does not provide a diagnosis and is not a substitute for professional judgment.

Run the assistant

Flag · prioritize · draft · you review and sign

X-RAY CT MRI BUILT WITH RADIOLOGISTS

Decision support not a diagnosis

You review & sign

Dose data reaches a monitoring product through the same plumbing as everything else in a radiology department, so the integration questions are the ones covered in radiology PACS integration, DICOM and HL7. Which platform holds the images in the first place is a separate purchase, worked through in PACS software and PACS system vendors compared by study volume, and where they live long term in enterprise imaging and vendor neutral archive software. The operational half, where protocols and scheduling live, is the radiology information system.

The California rule lands on the report rather than on a dashboard, which makes it a documentation problem: see structured radiology reporting for how discrete fields get a number into signed text consistently, and the radiology reporting software comparison for the products that do it. For what surrounding radiology software costs against federal contract data, radiology software pricing breaks it down by category, and the contract terms worth negotiating covers renewal uplift and the fully loaded first-year total.

Side by side

Five radiation dose management products, compared on what actually differs

Every product here draws a dose dashboard. The columns below are the things that vary between them, and the FDA row is the one most procurement checklists get wrong.

What you are comparing	Bayer Radimetrics	GE DoseWatch	Sectra DoseTrack	PACSHealth DoseMonitor	Imalogix
FDA 510(k) clearances for the dose product	None	None	None	None	None
How the category is regulated instead	Medical Device Data System territory, 21 CFR 880.6310, Class I	Same	Same	Same	Registered with FDA under product code OUG, Medical Device Data System, Class I
Parent company and what else it sells you	Bayer, which also sells the MEDRAD contrast injectors the dose data often references	GE HealthCare, so the scanners and the dose software come from one vendor	Sectra, whose PACS and enterprise imaging you may already run	PACSHealth, sold and supported in federal contracts through PHS Technologies Group	Independent, which is the argument for it if you want a vendor-neutral read on your own fleet
Federal prime contract awards found	9 awards, $938,458 total	5 awards, $491,538 total	None found	8 awards, $435,358 total	None found
Median federal award	$93,262	$91,000	No data	$36,000	No data
Most recent federal award seen	$212,601, VISN 8, October 2025	$91,000 maintenance, October 2019	No data	$74,064 service and support, September 2026	No data
Who buys it in the public record	Mostly VA networks, through Bayer directly and through resellers	VA sites, contracted through GE	No federal record found	VA sites, through PHS Technologies Group, GlobalMax and Agfa	No federal record found
The honest case against it	You are buying dose analytics from the company that sells you contrast injectors	Single-vendor convenience cuts both ways if you later move off GE scanners	Strongest if you already run Sectra; less obvious if you do not	Smaller vendor, and the federal footprint runs through resellers rather than direct	No federal contract trail to check, so ask for reference sites of your own size

FDA rows were checked against the openFDA 510(k) and registration and listing endpoints on September 15, 2026. Federal award figures are prime contract awards from USAspending.gov, retrieved September 15, 2026, with every recipient name and award description read individually before it was counted. A zero in the award row means no prime contract matched that product name in that database, not that the product is unavailable in the United States. Vendor ownership and feature scope change; confirm current products and pricing with any vendor before building a shortlist around this table.

Why it works

What your group gets with radiation dose monitoring

No product in this category has an FDA clearance

Searched on September 15, 2026, the openFDA 510(k) database returns zero clearances for Radimetrics, DoseWatch, DoseTrack, DoseMonitor, Imalogix and teamplay. The zero is real and it survives a cross-check: Bayer holds clearances, but for MEDRAD injectors rather than Radimetrics, and Sectra holds them for its pathology module, its workstation and its mammography system rather than for DoseTrack. The reason is that dose monitoring software moves and displays device data without altering how any device behaves, which is the definition of a Medical Device Data System at 21 CFR 880.6310, product code OUG, Class I. Imalogix appears in the FDA registration and listing database under exactly that code. If a procurement checklist scores these vendors on clearance, it will score all of them zero and learn nothing.

Real prices sit between about $25,000 and $250,000

Twenty-two federal prime contract awards for these products appear on USAspending, totaling $1,865,354, with a median of $70,500 and a range from $9,548 to $249,810. Radimetrics accounts for nine of them, including $249,810 through Change Healthcare in August 2019 and $212,601 for VISN 8 in October 2025. DoseWatch accounts for five, topped by $217,413 in February 2015 for a workstation and core license. DoseMonitor accounts for eight, including $137,401 to Agfa HealthCare in April 2026 and $74,064 in September 2026. These are federal prices for specific scopes rather than a list price, and many are maintenance renewals rather than new purchases, so read them as a sense of scale.

The California rule is about your report, not your dashboard

California Health and Safety Code section 115111 has required since July 1, 2012 that the dose of radiation be recorded on every diagnostic CT study in the patient record, and that the interpretive report either include the dose or have the protocol page attached. The dose is defined as CTDIvol and dose length product. A dashboard does not satisfy that. Text in the signed report does. Radiological.ai does not collect dose data and is not a dose monitoring system, but getting a required value reliably into signed report text is a structured reporting problem, and that is where it works: it drafts the structured report into your own template so required fields are present and consistent across readers. The radiologist reviews, edits and signs every study.

What it handles

Flagged, prioritized and drafted for your review

The assistant pre-reads each study, surfaces a region of interest for review, re-prioritizes the worklist, and drafts the structured report in your template. You confirm, edit and sign.

Drafts the structured report into your own template so required fields land in signed text consistently
Keeps documentation consistent across readers, which is what a dose disclosure requirement actually tests
Surfaces suspected findings for a second look before the report is signed
Prioritizes the worklist so urgent studies are read first
Works alongside your existing RIS, PACS and dose monitoring system rather than replacing any of them
Radiologist reviews, edits and signs every study

RADIATION DOSE MONITORING STAT

Region of interest flagged for review

A focal region is surfaced on the sample study for the radiologist to review. The assistant does not characterize it as a diagnosis.

Draft impression

Suspected finding flagged for radiologist review. Correlate clinically and confirm. Draft for review and sign-off.

Decision support · not for diagnostic use You review & sign

Why Radiological.ai

One assistant across the whole read

Not three vendors stitched together. Flag, prioritize and draft in one calm pane, on X-ray, CT and MRI, with the radiologist signing every study.

Flags suspected findings

A second set of eyes surfaces regions of interest for review on every study, so a suspected finding is less likely to slip past late in a shift.

Prioritizes the worklist

Suspected-critical studies move to the top, so urgent reads surface ahead of routine follow-ups across your sites and shifts.

Drafts the report

A structured draft arrives in your template, ready to edit and sign. The draft saves the typing and the measuring, never the judgment.

Good questions

Questions about radiation dose monitoring

Radiation dose monitoring software automatically collects the radiation dose reported by imaging equipment, stores it against the patient, the protocol and the scanner, and analyzes it for outliers. It reads DICOM Radiation Dose Structured Reports where the equipment produces them, falls back to reading dose screen images where it does not, and then benchmarks the results so a department can see which protocols and which rooms sit outside the expected range.

No, and it does not need to be. Checked on September 15, 2026, none of Radimetrics, DoseWatch, DoseTrack, DoseMonitor, Imalogix or teamplay has an FDA 510(k) clearance. Software that transfers, stores, converts and displays medical device data without controlling any device is a Medical Device Data System under 21 CFR 880.6310, product code OUG, Class I. Imalogix is FDA registered under that code. Clearance is therefore not a way to tell these vendors apart.

In vendor marketing the two terms are used interchangeably and you should not read much into which one a product uses. Where a distinction is drawn, monitoring means collecting and reporting dose data while management means acting on it, so protocol review, alert thresholds, and follow-up on outliers. Every serious product in the category does both. Judge them on the data sources they ingest rather than on the noun in the product name.

RDSR is the DICOM Radiation Dose Structured Report, a machine-readable object the imaging system produces that records what radiation was actually delivered, broken down by irradiation event. Most CT scanners built since roughly 2012 produce one. It matters commercially because a product reading RDSR gets clean structured values, while equipment that only produces a dose screen image forces the software to read numbers off a picture instead.

Yes. California Health and Safety Code section 115111 requires that since July 1, 2012 the dose be recorded on every diagnostic CT study in the patient record, and that the interpretive report either state the dose or have the protocol page attached to it. Dose is defined as CTDIvol and dose length product. The requirement is limited to CT systems capable of calculating and displaying dose, and excludes CT for radiation treatment planning and for attenuation correction in nuclear medicine.

The ACR Dose Index Registry is a voluntary national benchmarking registry. Facilities send de-identified dose index data automatically, and the ACR returns comparison reports showing how their exams sit against regional and national figures, with filtering to find outlier exams. It currently covers computed tomography, fluoroscopy, interventional procedures and digital radiography. Participation is something you opt into rather than an accreditation requirement, and most dose monitoring products will submit to it on your behalf.

Published list prices are rare, but federal contract awards give a real range. Twenty-two prime awards for these products total $1,865,354, with a median of $70,500 and a spread from $9,548 for an annual maintenance line to $249,810 for a full Radimetrics implementation. Expect scanner count and modality mix to drive the number more than user count, and expect annual maintenance to be quoted separately from the initial license.

The Joint Commission requires CT radiation dose documentation in the patient clinical record, and it also requires that dose incidents be identified and that performance be benchmarked externally. A small department can technically meet the documentation part manually. The incident identification and external benchmarking parts are where manual processes break down, because they require you to know your own distribution and compare it to somebody else, which is exactly what this software automates.

Partly, and this is the question to press hardest in a demo. Equipment that does not emit a Radiation Dose Structured Report normally produces a dose screen saved as a secondary capture image, so the software has to read the numbers optically. That works, but accuracy depends on the layout of each manufacturer and model. Ask any vendor for its exact behavior against your own equipment list, by make, model and software version, rather than accepting a general statement about legacy support.

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