Pediatric Dose Assessment in Routine CT Scan Procedures

Introduction:
Nowadays CT scan plays an important role in medical imaging and, as pediatrics is in the most sensitive group to radiation, optimizing radiation dose became an important issue for them.
Materials and Methods:
In this study, we examined the risk of cancer due to the common procedures of CT scan in children less than 15 years of age in children’s imaging centers in Tehran province. First, by entering the desired information to measure the dose of organs as a result of CT scan of head, chest, abdomen and pelvic in NCICT dosimetry software, dose of organs and also the effective dose was measured and the value of CTDIvol, DLP and were introduced as local DRL in Tehran province and were compared with other studies conducted in other provinces and countries. Then, using the second phase of BEIR VII report, we examined the risk of cancer in research.
Results:
The results of RDRL werecompared with other countries and previous data in Iran, CTDIVOL values were lower than the other national and international studies compared with except chest and abdomen-pelvic in European study, and in case of DLP, European values except cest and abdomen-pelvic scans, Tehran studies conducted in 2012, and abdomen and pelvic exams in UK ,Thailand and mazandaran studies, the others were higher than this study, also by examining the LAR value we concluded that the rate of breast, lung and colon cancers due to radiation was significant, also cancer incidence didn’t show a significant differences among boys and girls(P-value>0.05), but considering the total average of all cancers, it is generally understood that the risk of cancer is higher in females in all age groups and this difference decreases by age. As a result due to the importance and significant role of CT scans in medical diagnosis its use should be with caution.