Siemens SOMATOM SENSATION CARDIAC A60 - Manual (Page 14)

14
General
Fig. 1: User interface of the PC program WinDose.
All parameters necessary for the effective dose calcu-
lation have to be specified.
* * The Calculation of Dose from External Photon Expo-
sures Using Reference Human Phantoms and Monte
Carlo Methods. M. Zankl et al. GSF report 30/91
** Radiation Exposure in Computed Topography, edited
by Hans Dieter Nagel, published by COCIR c/o ZVEI,
Stresemannallee 19, D-60596, Frankfurt, Germany.
The concept of effective dose would allow the com-
parison of radiation risk associated with different CT or
x-ray exams, i. e. different exams associated with the
same effective dose would have the same radiation risk
for the patient. It also allows comparing the applied
x-ray exposure to the natural background radiation,
e. g. 2 – 3 mSv per year in Germany.
For most of our scan protocols, we calculated the
effective dose numbers for standard male* and female*
and listed the result in the description of each scan
protocol.
The calculation was done by the commercially avail-
able program “WinDose“ (Wellhoefer Dosimetry) – as
shown in figure 1- 3. For pediatric protocols, we used
the WinDose calculation and the correction factors
published in “Radiation Exposure in Computed Topo-
graphy“**, in which there only the conversion factors
for the age of 8 weeks and 7 years old are available.