(Sunday, 7/12/2020) [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]
Room: AAPM ePoster Library
Purpose: To present on overview of published data on diagnostic reference levels (DRLs) in South Africa. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved a national project to determine national DRLs. This presented an ideal opportunity to determine what data has been published for South Africa already.
Methods: A literature survey was done, published congress abstracts of the annual congress of the South African Association of Physicists in Medicine and Biology were searched and various authors were personally spoken to.
Results: A total of 16 publications were found, the earliest one from 2001. These included six published congress abstracts with results, nine full papers and one MSc thesis.
Ten publications had DRL proposals for diagnostic or interventional fluoroscopy; four had data for computed tomography and one publication for general radiography. The largest study dataset contained over 54.000 patient procedures. Another dataset containing over 20.000 data points for six interventional procedures showed DRL reductions between 9 % - 45 %.
Conclusion: South African X-ray license conditions demand an optimisation programme for certain interventional radiology procedures, which must include the establishment of DRLs. Some DRL data for South Africa exists, but it is rather patchy and uncoordinated. No national DRLs exist. Some of the data suggests that optimisation programmes have been successful in certain hospital groups, and a coordinated approach to data collection and analysis was started in February 2020 through the IAEA approved national project, with the aim of publishing national DRLs in 2021.
Keywords
Diagnostic Radiology, Optimization
Taxonomy
IM- Radiation Dose and Risk: General (Most Aspects)
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