Alliance Formed To Monitor Radiation Dose for Pediatric Imaging Care

A new U.S. alliance has been formed to protect children from excessive radiation doses generated from imaging procedures.

As medical imaging exams have replaced more invasive procedures, benefiting patients and transforming medicine, an individual's exposure to medical radiation has increased, raising concerns among imaging providers. Specifically, children are more sensitive to radiation received from imaging scans than adults, and cumulative radiation exposure to their smaller, developing bodies could, over time, have harmful effects.

Therefore, providers who perform imaging exams on children are urged to 1) considerably reduce, or "child-size,” the amount of radiation used; 2) not over-scan: scan only when necessary; 3) scan only the indicated region; 4) scan once; multi-phase scanning (pre-and post contrast, delayed exams) is rarely helpful; 5) be a team player; involve medical physicists to monitor pediatric computed tomography (CT) technique; and 6) involve technologists to optimize scanning.

These are the key messages of the Image Gently campaign launched in January 2008 by the Society for Pediatric Radiology (SPR; Restin, VA, USA), the American College of Radiology (ACR; Restin, VA, USA), the American Society of Radiologic Technologists (ASRT; Albuquerque, NM, USA, USA), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM; College Park, MD, USA), founding members of the Alliance for Radiation Safety in Pediatric Imaging.

The Image Gently campaign will first focus on CT scans. There were approximately four million pediatric CT scans performed in 2006 in the United States. In fact, the number of pediatric CT scans performed in the United States has tripled in the last five years as rapidly evolving CT technology replaces more invasive and often more expensive techniques. The Image Gently campaign is an effort to help ensure that medical protocols for the imaging of children keep pace with developing technology.

The Image Gently Alliance website contains the latest research and educational materials to aid radiologists, radiologic technologists, medical physicists, and other imaging stakeholders in determining the appropriate radiation techniques to be used in the imaging of children and how the radiation received from these exams may affect pediatric patients over time. A key feature of the new website is a library of helpful protocols that can be used for the imaging of children. Radiologists and other imaging providers are urged to visit the Image Gently website and pledge to do their part to "child-size” the radiation dose used in children's imaging.


Related Links:
Image Gently Alliance
Society for Pediatric Radiology
American College of Radiology