Radiation safety in fluoroscopy-guided interventions is crucial for patient care, quality assurance, and occupational safety. With dose-tracking software, it's now possible to simultaneously monitor patient dose as well as effective doses to the medical staff during interventional procedures, said presenter Dr. Anna Sailer of Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands and Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, CA.
Interventional radiologists usually don't know how high a dose they and their patients receive during a particular procedure, so the researchers hypothesized that providing medical staff with weekly personal feedback on patient and staff dose would lead to increased awareness and optimized practice of the as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA) principle.
Therefore, "it may be considered as a new approach to dose optimization," she said.
The personalized dose feedback was highly appreciated by the medical staff, according to Sailer.
"Personalized dose feedback increases occupational radiation dose awareness and can contribute to improving radiation safety and individual protection in clinical practice," she told AuntMinnie.com. "It can be further used for quality control and benchmarking of patient and staff doses."
Check out this presentation for all of the details.
