MO‐D‐110‐04: Imaging Symposium

Abstract

Patients who undergo medical imaging procedures such as fluoroscopy are exposed to ionizing radiations. The quantification of the amount of radiation used to perform a given examination is achieved by the Kerma Area Product (KAP) that is incident on the patient, together with appropriate information on the beam quality (i.e., Half Value Layer). A formal methodology will be presented to show how Kerma Area Product (KAP) in fluoroscopy, as well as the corresponding patient effective dose, can be converted into individual patient radiation risk provided appropriate account is taken of the irradiation geometry, patient size and demographics. It is concluded that patient specific risks in medical imaging are essential for identifying indicated examinations, where the patient benefit exceeds any radiation risk. Of equal importance is the fact that current scientific knowledge may be employed to enable practitioners to compute patient risks for any type of fluoroscopy based examination.