Radiation dose survey in conventional pediatric radiology

Abstract EN

A survey of some conventional radiographic techniques, Entrance Surface Dose (ESD) and Effective Dose (ED) for pediatrics has been carried out for 811 patients undergoing five different examinations for mobile and conventional (fixed) X ray equipment.

For the fixed equipment, the examinations were: abdomen, chest, cervical spine, skull and lumbar spine, for different projections AP, PA and LAT in a total of 432 patients.

For the mobile equipment, a similar study was performed for 379 patients and for two examinations: abdomen and chest for the AP projection only.

The pediatric hospital was the Instituto Fernandes Figueira (IFF) from FIOCRUZ (Brazil).

For each examination, 4 different age groups 0-1, 1-5, 5-10 and 10-15 years were studied for both types of equipments.

Results can be compared for abdomen AP and chest AP only, because were the only kind of examinations performed with both types of equipment.

The mean ESD (mGy) and ED (mSv) were calculated using the DoseCal software.

For chest examination in AP the ESD for fixed and mobile X ray equipment for the 0-1 age group were 67mGy and 39mGy respectively.

For abdomen AP, results were: 242mGy for fixed and 57mGy for mobile equipment.

Similarly, the ED values for different types of equipment for chest AP were 12mSv (fixed) and 8mSv (mobile).

For abdomen, results were 53mSv and 13mSv (fixed and mobile), respectively.

It can be seen that all results for the fixed equipment are systematically higher.

KEYWORDS: Entrance Skin Dose, DoseCal software, Effective Dose, Pediatric Radiology