Background/introduction
Sidra Medicine is a new paediatric hospital in Qatar. Since the activation of the radiology service,patient doses have been recordedusing a dose monitoring system in order to establish local diagnostic reference levels.
European Guidelines[1] recommend age/weight groupings to be used for monitoring paediatric diagnostic reference levels. Currently, age grouping of patient exams is more practicable at our site but could result in misrepresentation of our local diagnostic reference levelson account of our varied patient demographics.
The purpose of the work presented in this posterwas to...
Description of activity and work performed
The study included pediatric patients who had digital radiography examinations of chest and/or abdomen performed at our site. The local diagnostic reference levels for each view were calculated as the median Dose Area Product (DAP) using the age criteria and then repeated using the weight criteria recommended by European guidelines [1].
Following this, the study reviewed patient weight statistics (mean, median and standard deviation) for each age group and compared results with the corresponding weight range recommended by the European guidelines.
Conclusion and recommendations
As seen in figure 1, local diagnostic reference levels were comparable when either age or weight groupings were used for our patient population up to the age of 14 (50kg) for both Chest and Abdomen studies. Weight groupings demonstrated slightly higher specificity (lower standard deviation) only for abdomen exams. However, there was a difference in resultsfor the older age group in both types of study.
The audit of patient agefor our study, shown in figure 2, verified that the median and mean ages of our...
Personal/organisational information
C. E. Kelly; Doha/QA - nothing to disclose I. Delakis; Doha/QA - nothing to disclose C. Owens; Doha/QA - nothing to disclose A. Shabani; Doha/QA - nothing to disclose
References
[1] Report 185. European Guidelines on Diagnostic Reference Levels for Paediatric Imaging. European Commission, 2018.