Patient radiation doses and reference levels in pediatric interventional radiology.

OBJECTIVES: To describe, in a multicentric paediatric population, reference levels (RLs) for three interventional radiological procedures.

METHODS: From January 2012 to March 2015, children scheduled for an interventional radiological procedure in two French tertiary centres were retrospectively included and divided into four groups according to age: children younger than 2 years (A1), aged 2-7 years (A5), 8-12 years (A10) and 13-18 years (A15). Three procedures were identified: cerebral digital subtraction angiography (DSA), brain arteriovenous malformation (bAVM) embolization, and head and neck superficial vascular malformation (SVM) percutaneous sclerotherapy. Demographic and dosimetric data, including dose area product (DAP), were collected.

RESULTS: 550 procedures were included. For DSA (162 procedures), the proposed RL values in DAP were 4, 18, 12 and 32 Gy∙cm2 in groups A1, A5, A10 and A15, respectively. For bAVM embolization (258 procedures), values were 33, 70, 105 and 88 Gy∙cm2 in groups A1, A5, A10 and A15, respectively. For SVM sclerotherapy (130 procedures), values were 350, 790, 490 and 248 mGy∙cm2 in groups A1, A5, A10 and A15, respectively.

CONCLUSION: Consecutive data were available to permit a proposal of reference levels for three major paediatric interventional radiology procedures.

KEY POINTS: • We determined reference levels (RLs) for bAVM embolization, DSA and SVM sclerotherapy. • The proposed RLs will permit benchmarking practice with an external standard. • The proposed RLs by age may help to develop paediatric dose guidelines.