Effective dose estimation during pediatric chest X ray radiography

Abstract

Radiation doses to patients from chest X ray radiography which is the most common paediatric X-ray examinations were studied in two hospitals (MO) and (IB) in Khartoum state, Sudan. Entrance surface dose (ESD) was determined from exposure settings using DosCal software. Totally, 126 patients were included in this study. Mean ESDs obtained from for pediatric chest radiography in (MO) hospital recorded in this work was 0.049, 0.058, 0.100 and 0.054 mGy for the patients aged between 0-1, 1-3, 3-5 years and total sample respectively, and was 0.031 mGy for aged group in (IB) hospital . The mean ESDs per chest radiographic image ranged between 0.054 and 0.031 mGy in (Mo) and (IB) respectively per exposure, which is slightly lower than the corresponding values reported in the DRLs reported in European guidelines on quality criteria for diagnostic radiographic images EUR 16260EN As demonstrated in the discussion, patients’ doses were high in departments using single-phase generators compared with those using constant potential. The results presented will serve as a baseline data needed for deriving reference doses for pediatrics X-ray examinations in Sudan. The mean organ equivalent dose assessed from ESDs measured values for (MO) and (IB) using CHILDOSE (NRPB-SR279) to lung, breast, thyroid, liver, kidney , bladder, stomach and testis was 0.021, 0.039, 0.026, 0.013, 0.002, 0.006, 0.0013 and 0.00001 mSv for (MO) , 0.0120, 0.0293, 0.0149, 0.0076, 0.012, 0,0034, 0,074 and 0.0000076 mSv for (IB) respectively. The overall effective dose obtained from this study 0.0092 and 0.0053 mSv for (MO) and (IB) respectively. ‫