Image Gently, Step Lightly: increasing radiation dose awareness in pediatric interventional radiology

Children and radiation safetyThe National Council on Radiation Protection and Mea-surement reported in March 2009 that radiation dose to theUnited States population had risen sevenfold since the early1980s. CT and nuclear medicine are the two largestcontributors to medical radiation, with fluoroscopic expo-sure during interventional procedures the third largestcontributor, accounting for 7% of the total medical radiationdose to the U.S. public [1]. The readers of PediatricRadiology are well aware of the risks of unnecessary andexcessive medical radiation to our pediatric patients. Whilechildren undergo interventional procedures less commonlythan adults, the use of interventional radiology (IR) inpediatric care is increasing, and some more complexprocedures can result in long fluoroscopic times. Further,children with chronic illnesses may undergo many IRprocedures, and receive a higher cumulative dose fromrepeated exposures [2–6]. Just as with CT, it is our re-sponsibility to actively promote radiation protection duringIR cases. The Image Gently, Step Lightly campaign is a neweffort of the Alliance for Radiation Safety in PediatricImaging. Using the information provided on the website(www.imagegently.com), interventional radiologists canaccess valuable educational tools to help minimize radiationdose to themselves, to their medical colleagues in the IRsuite, and most importantly, to their pediatric patients.Pediatric interventional radiology and Image GentlyThe field of pediatric interventional radiology has devel-oped a more focused identity in the last 5 years as a resultof growth into a critical mass of practitioners and increasing