Patient Positioning in Radiology Today and in the Future

With genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology, technological progress is having a major impact on healthcare. Radiology is also a subfield of healthcare in which technological progress plays an enormous role. For this reason, imaging is becoming increasingly important in healthcare and is now indispensable.

Despite the enormous technological progress, some aspects of radiological imaging—such as patient positioning or even the interaction between radiology staff and patients—will likely never lose their importance. 

After all, these are all key areas for ensuring high-quality examination results. Therefore, this blog post will now take a closer look at the importance of patient positioning today and in the future. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF OPTIMAL PATIENT POSITIONING TODAY  

There are many benefits to optimal patient positioning for medical imaging and radiation therapy. First and foremost, optimal patient positioning ensures patient comfort and maximizes patient cooperation throughout the imaging procedure, thereby ensuring the successful completion of the examination. 

Comfort can refer to minimizing or avoiding any new pain caused by tension in the body; it can also refer to the patient receiving optimal support for areas of the body that they already know to be injured or weak, in order to avoid aggravating that injury or weakness. As a result, patients can remain still for longer, if necessary, to complete a successful examination and obtain the best possible diagnostic result.  

A patient who can remain still due to optimal positioning minimizes the occurrence of motion-related image artifacts, which can hinder diagnosis, and thus enables optimal treatment pathways. These artifacts can appear as ghosting, blurring, or ringing artifacts on images and severely compromise image quality, reducing diagnostic confidence.¹ While many different imaging sequences are now faster than ever before to allow for some degree of motion tolerance, and software exists to correct for motion, optimal positioning ensures that the raw, native imaging data are of the highest quality for diagnosis.  

Furthermore, optimal patient positioning builds trust between the patient and the healthcare provider and ensures a positive patient experience. An optimal patient experience is central to the delivery of healthcare, as it ensures that the patient will return for another examination, if needed, to continue the diagnosis and treatment process. It also fosters positive feedback for the healthcare provider and the diagnostic procedure; since this feedback can now be shared with many other users through social media and other channels, every effort to improve the patient experience serves as an additional “vote of confidence” in the healthcare system and the procedure involved. Patient experience is so vital that it is captured as part of economic analysis for healthcare delivery through patient-reported experience measures (PREMs). 

Finally, optimal patient positioning is also vital for patient safety, as it can reduce radiation dose, minimize scan time, and improve patients’ vital signs during imaging. For example, pregnant patients should avoid lying flat on their back during MRI scans; instead, they should be positioned on their left side to prevent compression of the inferior vena cava.

 

PATIENT POSITIONING IN THE FUTURE 

Optimal patient positioning is not only important for minimizing motion artifacts and improving patient experience and safety, but it is also essential for ensuring the reproducibility of data acquisition for clinical trials, as well as for the design, validation, evaluation, and redesign of artificial intelligence tools. Since large amounts of data are required to train an AI algorithm, standardizing positioning is vital not only for identifying anatomical landmarks within that large sample size but also for localizing pathology. Given the wide variety of patient body types, positioning in these AI studies is often the only—and much-needed—constant that enables accurate measurements. Conversely, AI technology can be used to assess the variability of patient positioning as a vital reference point for evaluating image quality and diagnosis.3 

Standardized patient positioning is also necessary for longitudinal medical imaging studies to demonstrate disease progression or for treatment monitoring. Standardizing patient positioning during data acquisition for AI tool design is vital for optimal image quality (signal-to-noise ratio, contrast, spatial resolution, and avoidance of image artifacts) to ensure that differences in imaging results stem from variations in AI algorithms rather than from patient-induced variations. Despite all these new technologies, patient positioning remains vital as it provides the ground truth and reference for image quality derived from native, unprocessed data.  

Future patient positioning tools will need to comply with increasingly complex safety guidelines while also being adaptable to the imaging modality being used, as well as to the patient’s physique and preferences. Infection control will remain a key focus even after the pandemic, and positioning tools should be easy to disinfect. These tools will also need to address the needs of an increasingly aging population. Furthermore, with improved access to healthcare for diverse populations—following years of advocacy and research—these tools will need to be co-designed and tested by patients themselves to enhance their experience and directly address their complex needs and preferences. This is an exciting time, one in which direct patient input can shape future healthcare provisions in positioning and beyond—exactly as it should be, since it is their needs we must meet and their preferences we must address. 

 

CONCLUSION 

In conclusion, patient positioning plays a crucial role in modern radiography and medical imaging. It enhances patient comfort and improves patient cooperation. Because of this increased comfort, patients can remain still for longer periods of time, which in turn leads to fewer motion artifacts and ultimately results in an optimal diagnosis. Patient positioning is also vital for building trust between the patient and the healthcare provider, which in turn has a positive impact on the patient experience. Furthermore, optimal patient positioning is also beneficial for patient safety because it can reduce radiation dose and minimize scan time. 

Optimal patient positioning will also be essential in the future, when artificial intelligence plays a more significant role in medical imaging and radiography. Standardized patient positioning makes it easier to train artificial intelligence using standardized data, which improves overall image quality. Consequently, it stands to reason that, in the future, we should place an increasing emphasis on patient comfort in the radiology department. 

Credits to: Dr. Christina Malamateniou, PhD (MRI), MA (Clinical Education), DIC, MAcadMEd, B.Sc. (Hons), SFHEA

ABOUT PEARL TECHNOLOGY

Pearl Technology AG, based in Schlieren, offers innovative solutions for the positioning and immobilization of patients in radiology and radiation therapy. The products are manufactured in Switzerland in accordance with ISO 13485 and are characterized by ease of use, high patient comfort, and excellent hygiene, ensuring smooth and safe examination procedures.

Downloadmore information about our patient positioning solutions for radiology and nuclear medicine.

LIST OF REFERENCES

1. Malamateniou C, Malik SJ, Counsell SJ, Allsop JM, McGuinness AK, Hayat T, Broadhouse K, Nunes RG, Ederies AM, Hajnal JV, Rutherford MA. Motion-compensation techniques in neonatal and fetal MR imaging. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol. June–July 2013;34(6):1124–36. 

2. Fujita N, Higuchi H, Sakuma S, Takagi S, Latif MAHM, Ozaki M. Effect of the right-lateral versus left-lateral tilt position on compression of the inferior vena cava in pregnant women as determined by magnetic resonance imaging. Anesth Analg. June 2019;128(6):1217-1222. 

3. S. Young, M. Kotnik, L. Lin, M. Sevenster, N. Wieberneit, T. Harder, S. Krönke, D. Bystrov, H. J. Lamb. Measuring patient positioning quality in clinical chest radiographs, ECR 2020 abstracts, EPOS https://epos.myesr.org/poster/esr/ecr2020/C-12328 (accessed July 6, 2022)  

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