SU‐C‐18C‐04: Evaluation of Effective Dose During Ureteroscopy for Obese and Non‐Obese Patients

Abstract

Purpose:Ureteroscopy involves fluoroscopy which potentially results in considerable amount of radiation dose to the patient. Purpose of this study was two‐fold: (a) to develop the effective dose computational model for obese and non‐obese patients undergoing left and right ureteroscopy, and (b) to evaluate the utility of a commercial Monte Carlo software for dose assessment in ureteroscopy.Methods:Organ dose measurements were performed on an adult male anthropomorphic phantom, representing the non‐obese patients, with 20 high‐sensitivity MOSFET detectors and two 0.18cc ionization chambers placed in selected organs. Fat‐equivalent paddings were placed around the abdominal region to simulate for obese patients. Effective dose (ED) was calculated using ICRP 103 tissue weighting factors and normalized to the effective dose rate in miliSivert per second (mSv/s). In addition, a commercial Monte Carlo (MC) dose estimation program was used to estimate ED for the non‐obese model, with table attenuation correction applied to simulate clinical procedure.Results:For the equipment and protocols involved in this study, the MOSFETderived ED rates for the obese patient model (‘Left’: 0.0092±0.0004 mSv/s; ‘Right’: 0.0086±0.0004 mSv/s) was found to be more than twice as much as that to the non‐obese patient model (‘Left’: 0.0041±0.0003 mSv/s; ‘Right’: 0.0036±0.0007 mSv/s). The MC‐derived ED rates for the non‐obese patient model (‘Left’: 0.0041 mSv/s; ‘Right’: 0.0036 mSv/s; with statistical uncertainty of 1%) showed a good agreement with the MOSFET method.Conclusion:The significant difference in ED rate between the obese and non‐obese patient models shows the limitation of directly applying commercial softwares for obese patients and leading to considerable underestimation of ED. Although commercial softwares offer a convenient means of dose estimation, but the utility may be limited to standard‐man geometry as the software does not account for table attenuation, obese patient geometry, and differences between the anthropomorphic phantom and MC mathematical phantom.