Paediatric CT exposures: comparison between CTDI vol and SSDE methods using measurements and Monte Carlo simulations

Computed tomography (CT) is one of the most used techniques in medical diagnosis, and its use has become one of the main sources of exposure of the population to ionising radiation. This work concentrates on the paediatric patients, since children exhibit higher radiosensitivity than adults. Nowadays, patient doses are estimated through two standard CT dose index (CTDI) phantoms as a reference to calculate CTDI volume (CTDI vol) values. This study aims at improving the knowledge about the radiation exposure to children and to better assess the accuracy of the CTDI vol method. The effectiveness of the CTDI vol method for patient dose estimation was then investigated through a sensitive study, taking into account the doses obtained by three methods: CTDI vol measured, CTDI vol values simulated with Monte Carlo (MC) code MCNPX and the recent proposed method Size-Specific Dose Estimate (SSDE). In order to assess organ doses, MC simulations were executed with paediatric voxel phantoms.