Purpose: The goal of this work is to evaluate organ doses and lifetime attributable risk of cancer incidence and mortality in scoliosis examinations of adolescent patients performed with EOS imaging system, in order to optimize patient dose and protocols.
Methods: An anthropomorphic phantom of a normal patient, with thermoluminescent dosimeters in correspondence with the main organs at risk, was imaged with both EOS and computed radiography (CR). For each modality, effective dose was calculated from the measured organ doses. Lifetime attributable risk was computed accordingly to the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) and Public Health England (HPA) publications.
Results: Except for testes and eyes, which were excluded from the scan in CR protocol, for all the other organs the doses delivered with CR examination were higher than these delivered by EOS system. The effective dose in EOS examination (0.43 ± 0.04 mSv) is about two times less than the dose in computed radiography with anti-scatter grid examination (0.87 ± 0.09 mSv), and, consequently, also the cancer probability is lower (5.4 vs 9.7 number of any cancers induction cases per 100,000 person examined, for a 20-year-old male patient).
Conclusions: The EOS system is efficient in limiting patient dose. The shielding of testes and the exclusion of eyes from the scan could allow to further reduce the dose.
Keywords: EOS system; Lifetime attributable risk; Organ doses; Scoliosis.