Radiation Protection Dosimetry Advance Access originally published online on June 28, 2005
Radiation Protection Dosimetry 2005 117(4):432-439; doi:10.1093/rpd/nch468
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Technical Note
Preliminary study of using imaging plates to map skin dose of patients in interventional radiology procedures
1 Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tohoku University, 6-3 Aramaki-Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8578, Japan
2 Department of Radiology, Yamagata University Hospital, 2-2-2 Iidanishi, Yamagata 990-9585, Japan
3 Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., 2630 Nishiazabu 2-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-8620, Japan
* Corresponding author: hiroko{at}mail.pharm.tohoku.ac.jp
Received August 22, 2004, amended December 27, 2004, accepted January 30, 2005
A method using europium-doped BaFBr imaging plates (IPs) has been studied for mapping entrance skin doses during interventional radiology (IR); the mapping is useful for detecting overlap between irradiation fields and determining the most exposed skin areas. IPs, which are two-dimensional radiation sensors made of photostimulated luminescence materials, have a linear dose response up to
100 Gy, can accurately measure doses from 1 µGy to 10 Gy and can be used repeatedly. Because the energy dependence of IPs is rather high, the IPs were characterised in this study and a sensitivity variation of
13% was observed for effective energies of 32.7 to 44.7 keV, which are used in IR procedures. Simulation of actual interventional cardiology procedures showed that the variation of sensitivity was within 5%, meaning that IPs are practical for measuring skin doses during IR. Moreover, the patient data can be stored online and easily called up when IR procedures must be repeated, helping to prevent radiation injuries.