Speaker
Description
Medical exposure to ionizing radiation during interventional procedures can lead to stochastic consequences, such as an increased risk of cancer, and deterministic tissue responses when threshold levels are surpassed. Cardiac catheterization procedures, including percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), are commonly conducted in catheterization laboratories for many clinical indications and entail significant patient radiation exposure.
This study sought to assess patient radiation doses during PCI procedures conducted at four hospitals in Khartoum, Sudan. One hundred PCI procedures were evaluated prospectively. Calibrated kerma–area product (KAP) meters were used to measure patient radiation output. The National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) software, which is a verified dose calculation tool, was used to figure out the effective dose.
The average KAP (Gy·cm²) for each PCI procedure was 8.02 ± 0.75 (range: 6.86–9.74), 5.91 ± 0.52 (5.02–6.99), 7.64 ± 0.63 (6.24–8.51), and 12.94 ± 3.96 (9.51–22.71) for Hospitals A, B, C, and D, respectively. The predicted effective dosage for each procedure was between 4.2 and 20 mSv.
We compared the dosage levels of the patients to data that had just been published. A local Diagnostic Reference Level (DRL) for PCI was determined using the third quartile (75th percentile) of the KAP distribution.