Pediatric Dose. How Do You Compare?

Everyone loves reference ranges, especially when it comes to pediatric CT. Well at least I am dorky enough to admit it. Anyway, I have some good news for you. The American College of Radiology (ACR) has released long awaited benchmarks designed to help providers and technologists optimize radiation dose levels when imaging younger patients. The guidance incorporates nearly 5 years worth of data taken from more than 1600 health care facilities. The ACR gathered the does details on CT scans performed in patients 18 years or younger, and with most of the data coming from community hospitals. Great start so far!

Most of the guidelines previously published were pretty outdated. The new benchmarks represent a big step forward for optimizing imaging in children; and establishing these benchmarks is a vital tool to help guide facilities across the country. No longer do you have to wonder, “Am I doing it right, are we using too much dose?”

So, this new article just published in Radiology has all the details and the authors provide diagnostic reference levels and achievable doses for the 10 most common performed pediatric CT examinations in the United States. The ACR used their CT does index registry which represented a broad representation of geography and practice types to provide this data. This is also one of the first times I’ve seen national data regarding dose provided as a function of both patient size and age. Hopefully these results will enable facilities to effectively compare their pediatric patient dosage levels to the national benchmarks and work towards optimizing  their CT protocols to result in the appropriate dose for ruling out specific diagnoses.

As you know, radiologists, medical physicists and radiologic technologists should work together to ensure that each patient receives an optimized dose while maintaining great image quality. AND I think these new benchmarks will be especially valuable in practices where pediatric imaging is relatively in frequent.

Here is a link to the article (CLICK ME). Happy reading.

How can you use this new article and data to help your career? Easy peasy. Just print out the article I provided, read it thoroughly and then present it to your department manager and/or radiologist in charge of protocols. Let them know that you like to stay up on the current literature and would like to be involved in helping the facility follow the latest guidelines on pediatric CT imaging.

Now if you have further interest in advancing your career and working with your radiologist colleagues, I have a perfect FREE course just for you. What this course will do is give you a simple two-step process for becoming one of the most desirable technologists to work with at your institution. Have you ever thought, “What is the radiologist thinking? What is the radiologist looking for?”.  Well, go no further and check out this 100% FREE course which you can watch online, on your own time, whenever you want. No obligation to buy anything. To get instant access to the free course, just go to www.CTSuperTech.com.