What Safety Code 30 Means for Your Dental Clinic

A clear guide to daily digital X-ray quality assurance

When it comes to dental X-rays, image quality and radiation safety are directly linked. Health Canada’s Safety Code 30 (2022) sets the national standards for how dental clinics must operate and maintain their radiographic systems, including the responsibility to verify image quality every day.

Most clinics know about Safety Code 30 in theory, but the details often get missed. Here’s what the current 2022 code actually asks you to do and why old “film-era” tools like step wedges can’t keep up anymore.

What the 2022 Safety Code 30 Requires

Under Section B.3 of the 2022 Safety Code 30, every dental facility must perform:

• Constancy (daily) tests on all intraoral, panoramic, and CBCT units to ensure the imaging system is stable.
• Routine image-quality checks that evaluate density, contrast, spatial resolution, and noise consistency.
• Documentation of each test so results can be shown during audits or inspections.

These requirements are clear: clinics must demonstrate, with records, that their imaging systems are producing consistent, diagnostically acceptable images — every day.

Why Step Wedges Don’t Meet the 2022 Standard

Step wedges were created for film X-rays in the 1950s. They rely on visual comparison: a human looking at shades of grey and judging if the image “looks okay.”

That approach breaks down under the 2022 Safety Code 30 because:

• It’s subjective—different staff can make different judgments.
• It lacks quantitative data (no measurable values to record or trend).
• It doesn’t integrate with digital systems for image archiving or traceability.

In other words, step wedges can’t generate the kind of objective, reproducible metrics the 2022 code expects for digital imaging QA.

How Phantom XY Meets Safety Code 30 the Digital Way

That’s where Phantom XY by MVD X-Ray Technologies comes in—the first fully digital QA phantom built specifically for dental X-ray compliance under Safety Code 30.

Phantom XY for intraoral and panoramic devices automates what the step wedge tried to do manually:

• Performs daily consistency tests aligned with the 2022 Safety Code 30 requirements.
• Analyzes images quantitatively (using metrics like contrast, density, resolution, noise) with no subjective guesswork.
• Generates instant pass/fail results based on measurable digital metrics.
• Stores results in the cloud for traceability and audits.
• Uses AI-driven algorithms to ensure every image meets diagnostic expectations.

With Phantom XY, clinics can show full compliance with Safety Code 30’s current 2022 requirements without manual tracking or subjective interpretation.

The Bottom Line

Safety Code 30 (2022) already requires dental clinics to perform and document daily QA testing for all digital X-ray equipment.
Relying on step wedges or visual checks leaves clinics exposed. Those methods can’t produce the quantitative records the code calls for.

By upgrading to Phantom XY, clinics can modernize their QA workflow, meet the code with confidence, and guarantee consistent, safe, diagnostic image quality every day.