medical

The New York Times has another article about poor radiation safety in medicine, and this time CT scanners are on their radar.

Its no wonder, given the amount of radiation these people must have had for hair loss to occur...

You can read the full article by clicking here.

The US FDA has launched an initiative to reduce radiation exposures resulting from medical examinations. The 3 steps to achieving this goal are to:

1. Promote safe use of medical imaging devices;
2. Support informed clinical decision making; and
3. Increase patient awareness.

You can read more about it at:

http://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/RadiationSafety/RadiationDoseReduction/ucm199994.htm

Below is a link to a New York Times article regarding a couple of radiation accidents in radiotherapy. This is the first in a series of articles that deals with medical radiation accidents. The article includes videos and an interactive graphic for those unfamiliar with multi-leaf collimators on linear accelerators.

A timely article, given the upcoming Asia Region ALARA Network (ARAN) meeting in Adelaide which will be discussing medical exposures. The ARAN meeting is on just prior to the ARPS conference.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Here is another story of large medical doses. This time, its more a case of the inability (or unwillingness) to share images. Perhaps the lesson here is 'Don't get sick!'.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5AF4QB20091116

A CT scanner in the USA has been operated at settings that has caused some patients to experience hair loss and skin reddening...

CT dose article

I'm not sure about the accuracy of the dose values reported, but in order to experience these effects, I have done a rough calculation and found that the skin dose would need to be about 50 times higher than a regular CT scan.This is easily accommodated by the very high capacity x-ray tubes now available in CT scanners.  The effective dose would be about 75mSv.

During the ARPS 34 Conference in Fremantle, Bill Toussaint in his Boyce Worthley Oration mentioned a book by Geoff Bennett about the early history of X-Ray in WA.  It was suggested that the book should be made available on the ARPS web site. The introduction by Geoff Bennett is below and the complete book can downloaded as a PDF (5.5 MB) by clicking on the picture.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is upping its focus on medical radiation protection by launching a scheme to log patients' X-ray dose each and every time they have an imaging examination. The agency's new radiation Smart Card project aims to provide all patients with a cumulative dose history that can be accessed from electronic health cards and/or digital hospital records.

(This article appears on the www.medicalphysicsweb.org website...a site worth subscribing to if you are interested in medical uses of radiation)