Keywords:
Cardiac, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Fluoroscopy, Radiation safety, Comparative studies
Authors:
M. Dehairs, H. Bosmans, W. Desmet, N. Bergans, M. Vanesch, N. Marshall; Leuven/BE
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-2852
Methods and materials
Two Siemens cardiac imaging systems (Siemens Artis Q 'system A' and Siemens Axiom Artis dBC 'system B') were included in this study.
For the commonly used clinical protocols,
service technicians set the start-up defaults for both fluoroscopy and ciné (acquisition) to the low dose settings,
instead of the medium dose setting.
Additionally,
the program names were adjusted to be more understandable and uniform across the different systems.
Operators were instructed to switch to higher dose mode only when needed clinically.
Monthly average dose-area-product (DAP) and peak skin dose (PSD) were compared before and after the change using the dose monitoring platform DOSE (Qaelum NV).
To check whether the reduction in DAP was realistic,
entrance air kerma rate measurements were performed on a 20cm PMMA phantom to compare the standard dose program to the low dose program.
Additionally,
an analysis was performed on how much the operators had to switch back to higher dose protocols.