(Sunday, 7/12/2020) [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]
Room: AAPM ePoster Library
Purpose:
This presentation is to discuss how since the turn of the last millennium, the pediatric radiology community has blazed a patient-quality and safety trail in helping to effectively address the public, medical professionals and the news media’s concerns about the implications of ionizing radiation from CT scanners in children.
Methods:
Addressing concern over pediatric CT radiation exposure quickly spread to the adult community and led to a national debate on the necessity of keeping ionizing radiation from medical imaging as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA). As such, this presentation reviews the potential deleterious effects of ionizing radiation, discusses why limiting radiation exposure in children is so important, tells the history of pediatric CT radiation exposure concerns, explains the interventions that took place to address these concerns and touches on the current school of thought on pediatric CT dose reduction.
Results:
Reported effective doses to 5-year old children from pediatric body CT were about 33 mSv in 2001 and 9 mSv in 2012. With advanced dose modulation technology, our results show a 5-year-old effective dose from chest/abdomen CT to be about 0.4 mSv. These figures illustrate the remarkable achievements in pediatric CT dose reduction that have taken place over the years
Conclusion:
Pediatric CT dose optimization is a work in progress and will continue to be for many years.
Measuring radiation dose to actual patients is not easy and optimizing an entity that is hard to measure is harder still. CT imaging professionals and the industry had shifted focus from best possible image quality to a balance of image quality with improved patient safety. On the way, partnerships created between radiologists, technologists, medical physicists, manufacturers, referring clinicians and regulatory bodies.
Keywords
Taxonomy
IM- Radiation Dose and Risk: General (Most Aspects)
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