For orthopaedic surgery, hip procedures have appeared to be by far the most usual surgery, and also those which imply higher doses to patients. Limbs attends for ankles, wrists, elbows, knees, femur, since in terms of radiation dose these procedures are much alike, so they have been gathered together to obtain a larger sample.
For Neurosurgery, spine procedures have been considered. Pain Unit procedures have been gathered together (mainly radiofrequency device placement) and also Urology, which attends mainly for Double J procedures but also some ureteroscopy, radiologically similar.
Higher doses correspond to Neurosurgery, with a median dose of 4.8 Gy.cm2. Pain unit procedures follows close with 4.1 Gy.cm2. These results are somehow similar to simple vascular radiology procedures performed at interventional rooms in our centre, like reservoir placement (1.8 Gy.cm2) or drainage catheter placement (6 Gy.cm2).
For Urologic procedures, median KAP is 0.89 Gy.cm2, and lowest doses correspond to orthopaedic procedures, as expected, with preliminary LDRL is 0.71 Gy.cm2 for hips and even lower for limbs, with 0.036 Gy.cm2.
Table 1 shows the mean, median and standard deviation for each procedure. Standard deviation shows the great dispersion of the data for almost every procedure. Automatic data extraction with a dose management system, would reduce transcription errors and allow to obtain larger samples with less effort.
Results for hips and limbs are similar to those measured by Rashid et al (6), with 0.66 Gy.cm2 for hips and 0.027 Gy.cm2 for limbs. Tsapaki (3) also presents KAP values in some orthopaedic procedures, with values between 0.02 and 0.60 Gy.cm2 for different limbs’ procedures, which would be in accordance with our results, and between 0.38 and 2.01 Gy.cm2 for different hips approximations.
Figure 1 shows the initial local DRLs obtained at this hospital, a first approach to optimization of patient and staff doses. This first attempt to evaluate doses in surgery rooms brings out that some procedures are far more complex than expected, and doses are not negligible and somehow comparable to simple interventional procedures or complex diagnostic procedures such as cystourethrography or oesophageal gastroduodenal tract.