Abstract
Nationwide surveys on radiation dose to the population from medical imaging are recommended in order to follow trends in population exposure. The goal of the 2018 survey was to investigate the current exposure. The invoice coding information was collected in five university hospitals and large clinics. To improve the estimation of the effective dose delivered in computed tomography (CT), we collected dose data from different Dose Archiving Communication Systems. On average, we found that 1.2 radiological examinations per year and per inhabitant were performed. Dental radiography was the most frequent examination (48% of all the X-ray examinations), followed by conventional radiography (36%) and CT (11%). The average annual effective dose was estimated to be 1.48 mSv per inhabitant, with CT representing 64% of that dose. Our results show that the exposure of the Swiss population from medical imaging has remained stable since 2013, despite a 15% increase in the number of CT examinations.
Highlights
In medicine, the use of ionizing radiation for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures plays a major role in patient care
For the estimation of the effective dose in computed tomography (CT), we evaluated the uncertainties using the dose length product (DLP) distribution for each CT procedure extracted from the Dose Archiving and Communication System (DACS)
The following results present the frequency of X-ray techniques for 1000 inhabitants, the average effective dose per modality and the average effective dose per inhabitant
Summary
The use of ionizing radiation for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures plays a major role in patient care. It accounts for almost all sources of man-made exposure and is the second largest contributor to overall population exposure worldwide[1]. Monitoring the exposure of the population from medical imaging is a legal obligation both at the European level (EURATOM 2013/59) and at the Swiss level[2,3] Monitoring makes it possible to follow the evolution of the average annual effective dose per inhabitant, to compare with the practice of other countries and to prioritize actions in radiation protection. The highest contribution to the collective radiation dose was from
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