In order to perform the best analysis possible, you need to have the right equipment at your disposal. That’s true of any job, and it’s especially important for those working in the radiology field. Here, we’re focusing on one particular piece of equipment that needs to be top-notch: Radiology monitors.
These types of screens are vital tools. As workhorses that often need to run for a long time, they need to be extremely reliable in addition to all the important features healthcare professionals rely on. So, when you’re looking for new radiology monitors to upgrade your setup, there are quite a few considerations you need to keep in mind.
This piece contains all the different things to look for when you are trying to decide which radiology monitors to purchase. Of course, the setting for the medical grade monitor will have a lot to do with any recommendations you might receive. Are you trying to set up a remote workstation in your own home? Or are you looking to purchase monitors for a hospital setting? We’ll strive to give good advice for both sets of needs.
After the setting you’re purchasing a medical grade monitor for, the next thing you need to consider is the purpose of the monitor. Read on.
Types of Radiology Monitors
When an individual or an organization is looking to purchase a medical grade monitor, there are typically two different categories that equipment can fall into: A diagnostic monitor or a clinical review monitor. Each has its own concerns, but they’re largely similar.
Diagnostic monitors are the real heavy lifters, running for as many as 24 hours at a time. All of the aspects we detail in the following sections are critical for diagnostic radiology monitors. However, the requirements for clinical review monitors are typically not as stringent. They tend to be used in briefer stints rather than the marathon runs of diagnostic monitors. They also don’t need to be as high quality because their main uses are in the workstations of non-radiology physicians and radiologic technologists.
No matter which of these two types of radiology monitors you need, they need to be built to a higher standard than the kind of monitor made for non-medical uses. Let’s look at some of the key considerations you’ll use to compare different radiology monitors.
Size
One of the most obvious places to start is the overall size of the monitor. The American College of Radiology recommends a portrait-style monitor with a width to height ratio of 3:4 or 4:5.
However, they also stipulate that wider monitors can be used as dual display workstations. These types of widescreen displays, with aspect ratios of 16:9 or 16:10, are useful for applications where displaying multiple images at once is advantageous. If you want to look at multiple CT series at once, for example, one of these types of radiology monitors would suit your needs well.
Bigger is not always better for a medical grade monitor. In order for the viewer to get a good look at the entire screen, the ACR recommends a diagonal size of 21 inches. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, like the widescreen displays we discussed in the previous paragraph. This size recommendation is simply a good rule of thumb.
The overall size of the monitor will have an impact on the other considerations, especially the resolution of the screen, which we’ll discuss next.
Resolution
When these images are captured, they are typically much larger than any radiology monitors you might want to view them on. As such, they need to be shrunken down. This is a necessary but slightly fraught process because you don’t want to lose any accuracy or detail with the compression of the image. That’s why having an adequate resolution on your radiology monitors is so important — a high resolution allows for the most accurate picture.
The resolution on a medical grade monitor should be at least 3 MP, 1,500 x 2,000 pixels, as a general rule of thumb. However, certain applications sometimes can benefit from larger pixel arrays. Mammography, for example, often uses 5 MP displays. This means professionals can view more of the image at once, which can increase efficiency by reducing the need to pan around the image to get a complete view.
Medical grade monitors can go up to 12 MP, but that level of quality is not strictly necessary. Complying with the American College of Radiology’s standard of 3 MP is the important number to keep in mind.
Pixel Pitch
A consideration related to the resolution of the display is pixel pitch. This is the measurement between the centers of adjacent pixels, and having a very small pixel pitch is critically important to image quality, especially for diagnostic radiology monitors.
Pixel pitch is measured in millimeters, and there are specific requirements for different kinds of diagnostic monitors. For X-Ray, CT, or MRI, it should be 0.21 mm or fewer. For ultrasound, fluoroscopy, and nuclear medicine, it should be 0.25 mm or fewer. And finally, for those larger mammography displays we discussed in the previous section, it should be 0.17 mm or fewer. Pixel pitch needs to get smaller as the display gets bigger in order to maintain the same quality.
Definitely keep an eye out for this metric as you are selecting a medical grade monitor, as it will be a key feature to getting the right kind of picture.
Brightness
After resolution and pixel pitch, brightness is the next component of a medical grade monitor that you should consider when you’re trying to make a selection. This measure needs to stay within a certain range in order for radiology monitors to be at their most effective and useful. Brighter is not always better — some nuances can get washed out if the brightness is too high.
Brightness is measured in candelas per square meter (cd/m2), and you’re typically looking at set minimum and maximum brightness values. Medical grade monitors need to have a low enough minimum and a high enough maximum brightness for all of the different shades of gray in between to be easily distinguished from each other. That gets into contrast, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
For mammography, the lowest brightness should be 1.2 cd/m2, and for other radiology applications, it should be 1 cd/m2. The maximum brightness varies a lot more — anywhere from 350 cd/m2 to 1,200 cd/m2 could be appropriate, depending on your needs.
Another aspect of brightness is the ambient luminance, or how much of the light from the room diffusely reflects off the display surface. Altering the lighting in the room or changing the settings for a particularly bright area are the only ways to account for ambient luminance that’s too bright.
Contrast
The third element of the picture quality on radiology monitors is contrast. This is measured as a ratio between the darkest black and the lightest white that a monitor can produce at one time. It’s important for radiologists to be able to distinguish between different shades of gray so that they can truly tell what they are seeing in the images, so having an appropriate contrast ratio is key.
However, extremely high contrast ratios can exceed what the human eye can actually tell apart, so it’s not necessary to find a medical grade monitor with the absolute highest possible contrast ratio. Another caveat to mention is that if you’re purchasing monitors for a hospital, it’s a good idea to keep them all at roughly the same contrast ratio. That way, correct interpretation across different monitors is easier to achieve.
Calibration
In order to make sure that your medical grade monitor is meeting all of the standards we’ve outlined here, it needs to be calibrated. First, you’ll need to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for finding the ambient luminance and making sure the lower brightness threshold is appropriate for that level of ambient light. Then, the monitor will need further calibration over time. There is also software available to calibrate your systems efficiently. Follow the recommendations for your specific brand of medical grade monitor.
Some radiology monitors are self calibrating. They have built-in sensors that can run on a set schedule. This is definitely a feature to watch out for if you’re concerned about keeping your monitors in the best working order possible. You’ll save time and energy by having the monitor calibrate itself rather than you taking time out of your day to do it yourself.
Quality Control
You rely on your medical grade monitor to show you accurate images, and in order to be confident in what you’re seeing, you need radiology monitors with excellent quality control. Quality control procedures are a vital aspect of keeping your medical grade monitor functioning properly.
Continuous quality assurance systems help maintain high image quality over time. You’ll want to ensure that your purchase will last for a long while, and quality assurance is part of that, along with the calibration tactics we discussed in the previous section.
Type of Screen
The American College of Radiology recommends liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and those types of radiology monitors make up the vast majority of today’s market. Other types of displays are typically discouraged, but there are some medical applications for organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays.
The main difference between an LCD and an OLED display is that the pixels themselves emit light with OLED technology. With the more standard LCD, the pixels simply transmit a backlight. OLED displays can be prohibitively expensive and are not yet optimized to meet the needs of a medical grade monitor, but some might fit your parameters, especially for a workstation with multiple uses. Thus, they’re not typically recommended as radiology monitors.
Definitely stay away from any other forms of displays, like CRT or plasma screens. Those kinds of technologies are vastly outdated for the needs of a medical grade monitor.
DICOM Compatible
If you’re not already aware, DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. It’s a well-established, international protocol that stipulates how medical images should be formatted, what quality they should be, and what data should be associated with them.
Any radiology monitors you purchase should be compatible with these standards. They allow for ease of distribution and access among different physicians. The whole diagnostic process can go quicker when DICOM standards are followed, which means patients benefit from more expedient care. Ensuring that all the equipment you purchase adheres to these guidelines means that you can have peace of mind that all of those tools will work together seamlessly.
Since it’s in their best interest to make sure their equipment can function in any medical imaging facility, most medical grade monitor manufacturers conform to DICOM standards. So, this is one criterion that should be very easy to satisfy.
Find the best radiology monitors for your needs.
Now that you’ve read all about radiology monitors, you should feel more comfortable making a recommendation or purchasing your own medical grade monitor.
There’s a lot to keep in mind while you’re shopping — we went over the importance of brightness, contrast, size, resolution, DICOM compatibility, and screen type, among other things, but there’s even more where that came from.
You’ll almost certainly need to be mindful of budget limitations as well as any unique needs of your specific space. We didn’t even touch on some of the extra features you might find with these monitors, like touch screen capabilities, for example. Some of the suggestions here might not be practical for your exact situation, so take what you need and leave the rest. The most important thing is to follow the quality guidelines set by respected organizations like the American College of Radiology.
All that said, though, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get started. You can begin by looking through our inventory and making note of what sorts of specific needs you or your organization has. If you have any questions as you browse, don’t hesitate to reach out.
