Quality Control Program in Medical Ultrasound at Hamad Medical Corporation: Current Status

The main purpose of QC program in diagnostic imaging modalities such as medical ultrasound equipment is to evaluate and define the performance and safety of ultrasound equipment. Ultrasound systems contain many sensitive transducers and soft parts which may be destroyed due to poor handling or use. Over time, any machines, regardless of their quality and usage, depreciates and incurs damage in many ways. The results from the Quality Control (QC) reports for B-mode of the Ultrasound machines in the Clinical Imaging Department of Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) has been reviewed. The average annual failures of equipment during the 4-year period includes 2.7% involved transducers and 51.3% involved mechanical integrity failures while the average annual failures rate from mechanical integrity and transducers were measured to be 12.8% and 0.7%, respectively. The main failure of the transducers could be from some artifacts or bad connection of individual elements or groups of elements. Evaluation of maximum depth of penetration showed that the measurement of distance accuracy is not effective in detecting equipment failures [1].