Paediatric Patients Dose Optimisation and Risk Assessment in Computed Tomography Examination

Abstract

Children are a distinct group of patients and should not be consider as small adults in terms of medical imaging procedures. Their size, physiology and the location of their organs change as they grow. Additionally, children have a longer life expectancy than adults hence consideration must be taken into account when the appropriate radiation dose is delivered. Therefore, the study was to estimate paediatric patients’ lifetime attributable radiation risk during computed tomography examination. The materials used include five different multi-detector computed tomography (MDCT) Machines, Head and Body phantom and MeVisLab (MVL) workstation. The weighted CTDI (CTDIw) and DLP values obtained were used estimate effective and organ doses to estimate the cancer incidence and mortality. In all 300 images of paediatric patients undergoing CT scans of head, chest, and abdomen-Pelvis from six CT centres were randomly selected. 200 images that met the selection criterion were analysed. The average values for organ dose and effective dose for Brain CT exam for age 0-5, 6-10 and 11-16 years were10.3 mGy, 1.3965 mSv; 11.18 mGy, 2.2785 mSv; and 19.82 mGy, 4.5102 mSv respectively for male patients. These values indicated increased values for Chest and abdominal pelvis examinations, with the dose increasing depending on the paediatric protocols that were used which depended on patient age band. The average cancer risk for incidence and mortality for head, chest and abdomenpelvis examinations were in the range 1 in 10,000 to in 1,000 of the study population.