Keywords:
Education and training, Radiation safety, Equipment, Conventional radiography, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Radiographers, Paediatric
Authors:
A. Maguire, K. Matthews; Dublin/IE
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-3096
Aims and objectives
It is the radiographer's legal duty to strive for optimisation [1].
Optimisation can be enhanced by using additional beam filtration to reduce the dose burden in projection radiography,
particularly for paediatric patients [2].
Analysis of literature reveals that beam filtration settings in digital radiography for paediatric patients are well researched experimentally [2-4].
However,
while the dose reducing benefits of beam filtration are acknowledged in literature [5-6],
there is less published evidence concerning whether beam filtration is either fully understood or widely applied in radiology departments.
The current study investigated the prevailing use of beam filtration in Irish departments that perform paediatric radiography.
The aims were to establish:
- whether filtration is optimised for paediatric patients;
- what factors influence decisions about the use of filtration for paediatric patients.