The research team sought to analyze radiation dose to pediatric patients from conventional x-ray studies, as this population is very sensitive to radiation and there are few studies on this topic, according to presenter Dr. Eduardo Fraile, PhD, of the Unidad Central Radiodiagnóstico in Madrid.
Using commercial software, it's now easy to obtain real-time information on the radiation dose produced in every examination, he said. The group connected six emergency rooms from six different general hospitals to a central PACS and installed a server to obtain the radiation doses for each study.
After one month, they analyzed the number of studies that had triggered alerts; the alert threshold was calculated based on two times the percentile median of usual clinical practice. More than 15% of the extra radiation dose applied to the pediatric population was directly caused by a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of how to handle these types of patients, the researchers found.
"The electronic and centralized platform is useful to reduce the dose of radiation in all studies, including conventional x-ray," Fraile told AuntMinnie.com. "Continuous education of personnel in the x-ray department helps to decrease the number of alerts or overdoses. It is very important to stress the education [on dose awareness] of the technicians in general hospitals when they work with pediatric patients."
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