The novel application of Benford's second order analysis for monitoring radiation output in interventional radiology

The radiation output for interventional radiology X-ray equipment is monitored annually during quality control testing; however, for a considerable portion of the year an increased output of the system, potentially caused by engineering adjustments or spontaneous system faults may go unnoticed, leading to a potential increase in the radiation dose to patients. In normal operation recorded examination radiation outputs vary over multiple orders of magnitude rendering the application of normal statistics ineffective for detecting systematic changes in the output. In this work, the annual DAP datasets complied with Benford's first order law for first, second and combinations of the first and second digits. Further, a continuous 'rolling' second order technique was devised for trending simulated changes over shorter timescales. This distribution analysis, the first employment of the method for radiation output trending, detected significant changes simulated on the original data, proving the technique useful in this case. The potential is demonstrated for implementation of this novel analysis for monitoring and identifying change in suitable datasets for the purpose of system process control.