#Industry News
New Materials to Protect Radiologists
Using X-rays, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, interventional radiologists and other clinicians can today carry out a number of minimally-invasive procedures that in the past would have required time-consuming and expensive surgery
However, this has also meant that more clinicians are potentially exposing themselves to high levels of radiation.
Cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and vascular surgeons are performing more and more percutaneous cardiac valve repairs and endovascular aortic repairs. In neuroradiology, the number of stroke treatments with thrombus aspiration is rapidly increasing and interventional therapy of liver metastasis with radionuclides is a new technique.
Reinhard Loose, professor of radiology at Erlangen University in Germany and the chairman of the European Society of Radiology’s Radiation Protection Subcommittee, explained:
A small subgroup of doctors working with ionizing radiation may be exposed higher than before.
Currently, clinicians working in interventional fluoroscopy are exposed, on average, to around two millisieverts (mSv) of radiation every year – well below the recommended annual maximum of 20 mSv. If clinicians take the recommended precautions, they should stay well below these limits, he added.
Nevertheless there are sometimes unshielded parts of the body which may receive significant exposure, like hands and fingers, brain, eye-lens and thyroid gland, if protective devices are not or not always correctly used.
News Materials Are More Expensive
The International Commission on Radiological Protection recently reduced the annual exposure limit for the eye-lens from 150 to 20 mSv after a 20-year study of 35,000 radiologic technicians in the United States showed that even relatively low doses of radiation can increase the risk of cataract.
