Effective Doses of Children During X-Ray Diagnostic Examinations: A Literary Review

Radiation diagnostics methods are widely used not only for the diagnosis of adult patients, but also in pediatrics. Children are the most radiosensitive group of the population, with a higher risk of developing long-term effects of ionizing radiation than adults. Therefore, control of exposure levels of pediatric patients is a priority. Nowadays, many publications have been devoted to the issues of radiation safety of children in foreign countries. There is no reliable information of diagnostic exposure levels of children in the Russian Federation. In domestic publications, these issues are considered insufficiently. Foreign and domestic publications of children exposure levels during X-ray, interventional and computed tomography examinations (CT-examinations) were analyzed. First of all, publications containing a quantitative characteristic of exposure levels in terms of effective dose (ED) were considered. Effective doses presented in the publications were recalculated in accordance with the division of age groups adopted in the Russian Federation for the convenience of comparing the values with each other: 0‒0.5; 0.5‒3; 3‒8; 8‒13; 13–18 years old. This study presents the average of weighted effective doses for children of all age groups for different types of radiography, interventional and CT-examinations. According to publications the average weighted effective doses of children on average for all types of X-ray diagnostics are lower in the Russian Federation than in foreign countries. To ensure the radiation protection of children in the Russian Federation during radiography, interventional and CT-examinations, it is necessary to increase the reliability of information of children exposure levels, by improving the systems for collecting data, monitoring and accounting of individual patient doses, and raising the level of awareness of specialists.