Estimation of the total effective dose from low-dose CT scans and radiopharmaceutical administrations delivered to patie
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Estimation of the total effective dose from low-dose CT scans and radiopharmaceutical administrations delivered to patients undergoing SPECT/CT explorations Carlos Montes • Pilar Tamayo • Jorge Hernandez Felipe Gomez-Caminero • Sofia Garcı´a • Carlos Martı´n • Angela Rosero
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Received: 15 October 2012 / Accepted: 28 March 2013 Ó The Japanese Society of Nuclear Medicine 2013
Abstract Hybrid imaging, such as SPECT/CT, is used in routine clinical practice, allowing coregistered images of the functional and structural information provided by the two imaging modalities. However, this multimodality imaging may mean that patients are exposed to a higher radiation dose than those receiving SPECT alone. Objectives The study aimed to determine the radiation exposure of patients who had undergone SPECT/CT examinations and to relate this to the Background Equivalent Radiation Time (BERT). Methods 145 SPECT/CT studies were used to estimate the total effective dose to patients due to both radiopharmaceutical administrations and low-dose CT scans. The CT contribution was estimated by the Dose-Length Product method. Specific conversion coefficients were calculated for SPECT explorations. Results The radiation dose from low-dose CTs ranged between 0.6 mSv for head and neck CT and 2.6 mSv for whole body CT scan, representing a maximum of 1 year of background radiation exposure. These values represent a decrease of 80–85 % with respect to the radiation dose from diagnostic CT. The radiation exposure from C. Montes and P. Tamayo contributed equally to this work. C. Montes (&) J. Hernandez S. Garcı´a C. Martı´n Medical Physics Department, University Hospital of Salamanca, Paseo de San Vicente, 58-182, 37007 Salamanca, Spain e-mail: [email protected] C. Montes P. Tamayo Institute of Biomedical Research of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain P. Tamayo F. Gomez-Caminero A. Rosero Nuclear Medicine Department, University Hospital of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
radiopharmaceutical administration varied from 2.1 mSv for stress myocardial perfusion SPECT to 26 mSv for gallium SPECT in patients with lymphoma. The BERT ranged from 1 to 11 years. Conclusions The contribution of low-dose CT scans to the total radiation dose to patients undergoing SPECT/CT examinations is relatively low compared with the effective dose from radiopharmaceutical administration. When a CT scan is only acquired for anatomical localization and attenuation correction, low-dose CT scan is justified on the basis of its lower dose. Keywords SPECT/CT Effective dose Background Equivalent Radiation Time Radiopharmaceutical
Introduction Hybrid imaging systems have become increasingly widely used in routine clinical practice in recent years, mainly due to the success of integrated positron emission tomography/ computed tomography (PET/CT) systems [1, 2]. These systems allow the sequential acquisition of functional (PET) and anatomical (CT) information from a patient in a single examination, providing coregistered images that combine functiona
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