Keywords:
Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Radiation physics, Interventional vascular, Fluoroscopy, Dosimetry, Radiation safety, Quality assurance
Authors:
M. Dehairs1, N. Fitousi1, F. Rogge1, J. Jacobs1, L. Struelens2, H. Bosmans1, N. Marshall1; 1Leuven/BE, 2Mol/BE
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-3715
Aims and objectives
Nowadays,
interventional procedures are extensively used for diagnostic and therapeutic purpose.
The use of ionizing radiation during these procedures involves the risk of high radiation dose on the patient’s skin which may lead to mild or severe skin reactions [1-2].
Especially in pediatric patients and when there is the need for repetitive procedures,
like the case of congenital cardiac diseases,
which requires complex cardiac catheterization and follow up [3],
it is essential to estimate the skin dose in an accurate way.
Additionally,
the excess of radiation use in radiology and cardiology and the suggestions of the Council Directive 2013/59/Euratom for dose reporting [4] have highlighted the need for patient radiation dose monitoring.
To facilitate this task,
special software that may offer not only monitoring of the device output but also more advanced personalized dosimetry have dynamically entered the radiology departments worldwide [5].
For interventional radiology and cardiology,
the dose management platform DOSE (Qaelum,
Belgium),
which is used at the University Hospitals Leuven (Belgium),
offers a vendor-neutral advanced peak skin dose (PSD) mapping using scalable pediatric and adult phantom models to match better the size of the real patient.
The purpose of this study is to validate the accuracy of this PSD tool and to evaluate the influence of the patient model on PSD estimates for pediatric patients in interventional cardiology.