Radiation Protection For Children Research Articles

WEO Newsletter.

WEO Newsletter.

Image Gently 5 Years Later: What Goals Remain to Be Accomplished in Radiation Protection for Children?

<i>Image Gently</i> 5 Years Later: What Goals Remain to Be Accomplished in Radiation Protection for Children?

Large-Scale Quality Improvement for Radiation Protection of Children Worldwide: Lessons From the Past Applied to the Present

The objective of this article is to highlight strategies that can be used to implement changes locally for improved safety of pediatric patients. Specific examples of international organizations engaged with quality improvement are discussed. Large-scale quality improvement to promote radiation protection for children is being aggressively pursued by numerous international organizations. These international agencies use quality improvement methods on a global scale to optimize medical imaging for all diagnostic imaging modalities that use ionizing radiation with the intent of lowering radiation dose to children. This work, although vast in scope, requires highly focused project goals with access to scientific expertise. In addition, these coordinated efforts must provide education, collegial support, and resources (both financial and technical) that enable radiology professionals to implement change locally for improved safety of pediatric patients.

Image Gently: progress and challenges in CT education and advocacy

Significant progress has been made in radiation protection for children during the last 10 years. This includes increased awareness of the need for radiation protection for pediatric patients with international partnerships through the Alliance for Radiation Safety in Pediatric Imaging. This paper identifies five areas of significant progress in radiation safety for children: the growth of the Alliance; the development of an adult radiation protection campaign Image Wisely™; increased collaboration with government agencies, societies and the vendor community; the development of national guidelines in pediatric nuclear medicine, and the development of a size-based patient dose correction factor by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, Task Group 204. However, many challenges remain. These include the need for continued education and change of practice at adult-focused hospitals where many pediatric CT exams are performed; the need for increased emphasis on appropriateness of pediatric imaging and outcomes research to validate the performance of CT studies, and the advancement of the work of the first pediatric national dose registry to determine the "state of the practice" with the final goal of establishing ranges of optimal CT technique for specific scan indications when imaging children with CT.

Image Gently pediatric digital radiography summit: executive summary

The goal of the Alliance for Radiation Safety in Pediatric Radiology’s Image Gently campaign is to promote radiation protection for children undergoing imaging examinations that use ionizing radiation. The campaign creates awareness, develops educational content toward this goal, and more recently has advocated for change in equipment design to better meet the needs of pediatric patients. A previous meeting sponsored by the Alliance, the Image Gently CT Vendor Summit in 2008, urged manufacturers to standardize the CT dose display and nomenclature across vendors and promoted the adoption of a more accurate dose display or patient dose index to account for the wide range of size variability among pediatric patients. The campaign held a second meeting, the Image Gently Pediatric Digital Radiography Summit, building on the work of Drs. Charles E. Willis and Thomas L. Slovis, co-chairs of the 2004 conference, the ALARA Concept in Pediatric CR and DR: Dose Reduction in Pediatric Exams [1]. Although digital radiography (DR) technology, which encompasses both computed radiography and direct radiography, has advanced rapidly, progress has lagged in standardization, quality initiatives, and education to minimize dose while preserving image quality. To address this issue, the Image Gently Pediatric Digital Radiography Summit was held at Mallinkrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis on Feb. 4, 2010. More than 70 guests participated, including radiologists, medical physicists, radiological technologists (RTs), equipment manufacturers, educators, representatives from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and medical professional societies. The goal of the meeting was to bring together the medical professionals who use this technology with the vendor community in order to review recent advancements in DR, discuss new standards for exposure indices, clarify the need for a national database and expand educational efforts. Plain film radiography is the most common examination in radiology, representing 74% of all radiologic examinations performed in the USA, including both adults and S. Don (*) Electronic Radiology Laboratory, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, 510 S. Kingshighway Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA e-mail: dons@mir.wustl.edu

15. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health and the Environment 23 Years Later

More than 50% of Chernobyl's radionuclides were dispersed outside of Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia and caused fallout as far away as North America. In 1986 nearly 400 million people lived in areas radioactively contaminated at a level higher than 4 kBq/m(2) and nearly 5 million individuals are still being exposed to dangerous contamination. The increase in morbidity, premature aging, and mutations is seen in all the contaminated territories that have been studied. The increase in the rates of total mortality for the first 17 years in European Russia was up to 3.75% and in Ukraine it was up to 4.0%. Levels of internal irradiation are increasing owing to plants absorbing and recycling Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am. During recent years, where internal levels of Cs-137 have exceeded 1 mSv/year, which is considered "safe," it must be lowered to 50 Bq/kg in children and to 75 Bq/kg in adults. Useful practices to accomplish this include applying mineral fertilizers on agricultural lands, K and organosoluble lignin on forestlands, and regular individual consumption of natural pectin enterosorbents. Extensive international help is needed to provide radiation protection for children, especially in Belarus, where over the next 25 to 30 years radionuclides will continue to contaminate plants through the root layers in the soil. Irradiated populations of plants and animals exhibit a variety of morphological deformities and have significantly higher levels of mutations that were rare prior to 1986. The Chernobyl zone is a "black hole": some species may persist there only via immigration from uncontaminated areas.