Patient and staff doses in interventional neuroradiology

Radiation doses for interventional examinations are generally high and therefore necessitate dose monitoring for patients and staff. Relating the staff dose to a patient dose index, such as dose-area product (DAP), could be quite useful for dose comparisons. In this study, DAP and skin doses of 57 patients, who underwent neurointerventional examinations, were measured simultaneously with staff doses. Although skin doses were comparable with the literature data, higher DAP values of 215 and 188.6 Gy cm(2) were measured for the therapeutical cerebral and carotid examinations, respectively, owing to the use of biplane system and complexity of the procedure. Mean staff doses for eye, finger and thyroid were measured as 80.6, 77.6 and 28.8 mu Gy per procedure. The mean effective dose per procedure for the radiologists was 32 mu Sv. In order to allow better comparisons to be made, DAP normalised doses were also presented.