Organ and effective doses in newborns and infants undergoing voiding cystourethrograms (VCUG): a comparison of stylized and tomographic phantoms.

The time-sequence videotape-analysis methodology, developed [Sulieman et al., Radiology 178, 653-658 (1991)] for use in tissue dose estimations in adult fluoroscopy examinations and utilized [Bolch et al., Med. Phys. 30, 667-680 (2003)] for analog fluoroscopy in newborn patients, has been extended to the study of digital fluoroscopic examinations of the urinary bladder in newborn and infant female patients. Individual frames of the fluoroscopic and radiographic video were analyzed with respect to unique combinations of field size, field center, projection, tube potential, and tube current (mA), and integral tube current (mAs), respectively. The dosimetry study was conducted on five female patients of ages ranging from four-days to 66 days. For each patient, three different phantoms were utilized: a stylized computational phantom of the reference newborn (3.5 kg), a tomographic computational phantom of the reference newborn (3.5 kg), and (3) a tomographic computational phantom uniformly rescaled to match patient total-body mass. The latter phantom set circumvented the need for mass-dependent rescaling of recorded technique factors (kVp, mA, mAs, etc.), and thus represented the highest degree of patient specificity in the individual organ dose assessment. Effective dose values for the voiding cystourethrogram examination ranged from 0.6 to 3.2 mSv, with a mean and standard deviation of 1.8+/-0.9 mSv. The ovary and colon equivalent doses contributed in total approximately 65%-80% of the effective dose in these fluoroscopy studies. Percent differences in the effective dose assessed using the two tomographic phantoms (one fixed at 3.5 kg with rescaled technique factors rescaled and one physically rescaled to individual patient masses with no adjustment of recorded technique factors) ranged for -49% to +15%. Percent differences in effective dose found using the 3.5 kg stylized phantom and the 3.5 kg tomographic phantom, both with patient-specific rescaling of technique factors, ranged from -10% to +17%. These differences are due in part to a reduced ovary dose in the tomographic phantom for right posterior oblique (RPO) views when compared to those seen in the stylized phantom.