Verification of radiation dose calculations during paediatric cystourethrography examinations using MCNP5 and PCXMC...

The estimation of the radiological risk in the case of children is of particular importance due to their enhanced radiosensitivity when compared with that of adult patients. The purpose of this study is to estimate the organ and effective doses of paediatric patients undergoing micturating cystourethrography examinations. Since direct measurements of the dose in each organ are very difficult, dose-area products of 90 patients undergoing cystourethrography examinations were recorded and used with two Monte Carlo codes, MCNP5 and PCXMC2.0, to assess the organ doses in these procedures. The organs receiving the highest radiation doses were the urinary bladder (ranging from 1.9 mSv in the newborn to 4.7 mSv in a 5-y old patient) and the large intestines (ranging from 1.5 mSv in the newborn to 3.1 mSv in the 5-y old patient). For all ages the main contributors to the total organ or effective doses are the fluoroscopy projections compared with the radiographs. There was a reasonable agreement between the dose estimates provided by PCXMC v2.0 and MCNP5 for most of the organs considered in this study. In special cases, there were systematic disagreements in organ doses such as in the skeleton, gonads and oesophagus due to the anatomical differences between patient anatomic models employed by the two codes.