Retrospective estimation of occupational exposure in interventional radiology from information recorded in a patient dose management system
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32685/2590-7468/invapnuclear.8.2026.776Keywords:
interventional radiology, personal dosimetry, Hₚ(10), Hₚ(3), dose-area product, patient dose management system
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Copyright (c) 2026 Deivid Orlando Lopez, María Esperanza Castellanos, Jorge Alberto Cifuentes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Abstract
Personal dosimeters in interventional radiology report the cumulative monthly integrated dose but cannot identify which procedures, angular configurations, or working conditions explain occupational exposure. A methodology was developed to estimate monthly occupa-tional exposure of medical specialists from information recorded in the XRDOSE patient dose management system, institutional procedure records and personal dosimetry, irradiation con-figurations, and environmental dose measurements. A total of 1,539 angiography studies were analyzed, involving 50,516 irradiation events—defined as continuous activations of the X-ray equipment—without excluding any modes or rejected images. Prioritization identified proce-dures and medical specialists with both high study frequency and high cumulative dose-area product (DAP) by intersecting the groups that covered at least 80% of each variable (P80-P80 criterion). The retained medical specialists formed the subcohort used to identify irradiation configurations and perform the monthly analysis. Within this group, 37,011 irradiation events occupied 5,449 exact angular pairs, which were grouped into 137 repeated configurations using
±5° intervals; nine representative intervals were selected, with 94.0% of irradiation events located within 20° of one of them. Under 17 irradiation conditions, a 20 cm solid-water phan-tom simulated the patient. Measurements were obtained with detectors positioned at heights representative of the medical specialists’ chest and eye-lens dosimeters. Five models were evaluated as multiplicative mathematical relationships between calculated monthly series and reported dosimetry. The retained model incorporated one medical-specialist-specific fac-tor for Hp(10) and another for Hp(3), with RMSE(10) = 0.134, RMSE(3) = 0.149, and mean score S =
0.141. Fixed reference dosimeters installed on the C-arms were also used. Comparison between
their estimated and reported monthly doses yielded a correlation of 0.838. These results show that information from a patient dose management system, mainly DAP, can support retro-spective estimation of monthly occupational exposure when integrated with study frequency, irradiation configurations, measurements under selected conditions, and individual factors.
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