Follow-up of children exposed to ionising radiation from cardiac catheterisation: the Coccinelle study: Table 1.

Cardiac catheterisation has become an essential tool in the diagnosis and treatment of children with a wide variety of congenital and acquired forms of cardiovascular disease. Despite the clear clinical benefit to the patient, radiation exposure from paediatric cardiac catheterisation procedures (CCPs) may be substantial. Given children's greater sensitivity to radiation and the longer life span during which radiation health effects can develop, an epidemiological cohort study, named Coccinelle or ‘Ladybird’ (French acronym for ‘Cohorte sur le risque de cancer après cardiologie interventionnelle pédiatrique’), is carried out in France to evaluate the risks of leukaemia and solid cancers in this population. A total number of 8000 included children are expected. Individual CCP-related doses will be assessed for each child included in the cohort. For each CCP performed, dosimetric parameters (dose–area product, fluoroscopy time and total number of cine frames) are retrieved retrospectively. Organ doses, especially to the lung, the oesophagus and the thyroid, are calculated with PCXMC software. The cohort will be followed up through linkage with French paediatric cancer registries

Direct Effective Dose Calculations in Pediatric Fluoroscopy-Guided Abdominal Interventions with Rando-Alderson Phantoms – Optimization of Preset Parameter Settings

The aim of the study was to calculate the effective dose during fluoroscopy-guided pediatric interventional procedures of the liver in a phantom model before and after adjustment of preset parameters.Organ doses were measured in three anthropomorphic Rando-Alderson phantoms representing children at various age and body weight (newborn 3.5kg, toddler 10kg, child 19kg). Collimation was performed focusing on the upper abdomen representing mock interventional radiology procedures such as percutaneous transhepatic cholangiography and drainage placement (PTCD). Fluoroscopy and digital subtraction angiography (DSA) acquisitions were performed in a posterior-anterior geometry using a state of the art flat-panel detector. Effective dose was directly measured from multiple incorporated thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs) using two different parameter settings.Effective dose values for each pediatric phantom were below 0.1mSv per minute fluoroscopy, and below 1mSv for a 1 minute DSA acquisition with a frame rate of 2 f/s. Lowering the values for the detector entrance dose enabled a reduction of the applied effective dose from 12 to 27% for fluoroscopy and 22 to 63% for DSA acquisitions. Similarly, organ doses of radiosensitive organs could be reduced by over 50%, especially when close to the primary x-ray beam.Modification of preset parameter settings enabled to decrease the effective dose for pediatric interventional procedures, as determined by effective dose calculations using dedicated pediatric Rando-Alderson phantoms