Methods and systems are provided for automatic exposure control in computed tomography imaging systems. In one embodiment, a method comprises in response to an object-specific dose metric input by a user via a user interface operably coupled to a scanner, predicting an image quality of a diagnostic scan, calculating an output level of a source of the scanner for the image quality, and performing the diagnostic scan at the output level when the image quality is higher than a threshold. In this way, patient-specific image quality settings may be determined.