Up-to-date data on the frequency of pediatric radiological examinations and the associated machine parameters were limited prior to the start of this study. Therefore, in a two-stage approach, it was necessary to first take stock of which studies may be relevant to the medical collective dose in terms of their frequency of implementation. The selection of studies for which technical scanner parameters have been collected should be re-assessed on a regular basis, and, if necessary, updated due to possible time trends in diagnostic radiology.

Results indicate that in participating institutions, pediatric radiology examinations in general comply with existing DRL. For some examinations, the distribution of parameter values is well below current DRL.

Comparable studies have been recently carried out in France, Switzerland and the Northern European countries Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Island and Finland (3, 4, 5, 6). Due to the need to stratify any analysis of technical parameters according to age or weight in pediatric radiology, it is necessary to collect much more data to estimate parameter distributions than for adults. All studies (Switzerland unknown) opted for manual data entry - DMS, PACS and RIS were not used as data sources. One reason for this decision is probably the patient's weight information, which has not yet been documented in IT systems and is therefore missing in our study. However, data collection directly from technical databases allows exporting much more data with respect to the number of examinations and to the number of analyzed technical parameters.

This project was funded by the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, BfS, 3617S42441).