Paediatric Radiology - Challenges

Challenges

Paediatric radiology comes with many challenges. Unlike adults, children cannot always understand / comprehend a change of environment. Therefore staff are usually required to wear colourful uniforms, usually 'scrubs', as opposed to a normal hospital uniform. It is also important to recognise that when a child is unwell, they follow their instincts, which is usually to cry and stay close to their parents. This presents a huge challenge for the radiographer, who must try to gain the child's trust and gain their co-operation. Once co-operation has been achieved there is another big challenge of keeping the child still for their imaging test. This can be very difficult for children in a lot of pain. Coercion and support from parents is usually enough to achieve this, however, in some extreme cases (such as MRI and CT), it may be necessary to sedate the child.

Another challenge faced is the radiation difference between an adult and child.

Medical Use of Radiation: Medicine has used ionizing radiation for decades to help diagnose or treat children (and adults). There is no doubt that this imaging has saved lives. Medical imaging use has grown exponentially in the past few years, particularly the use of Cat Scans (also called CT scans). There are approximately 65 million CT scans done in the United States annually with an estimated 8 million in children. However, there is a much higher radiation dose from CT scans than from the traditional radiographs and fluoroscopy tests that radiologists perform and interpret. CT scans provide much more information about the anatomy and diseases in the body. To do this, though, they may expose a person to 100 to 250 times the radiation dose compared to a chest x-ray.

Radiation Safety Issues: There are risks from ionizing radiation that are comprehensively studied in the survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945. Longitudinal studies led by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States have shown increased cancer rates in this population that are dose dependent. From these data, modelling research suggests that even at the lower doses used in medical imaging, there may be an added risk of cancer. Last year, two medical physicists suggested that the increasing use of Cat Scans in the United States may increase cancer incidence in the future.

Paediatric Radiation Protection Issues: Children are more radiosensitive than adults. They also have a longer life expectancy over which they may develop cancer from exposures to ionizing radiation. The paediatric radiology and medical community has long had an awareness of this issue and has developed radiation protection policies and practices that reflect this. With the increased use of imaging and in particular, CT scanning, there is increasing attention to this issue by the entire medical and radiology communities.An educational resource for health care providers as well as patients and parents is the Image Gently web site started in 2008. There is collaboration by several radiology, medical physics, paediatrics, and governmental organizations to increase awareness of radiation safety issues in children and to provide education to all stakeholders caring for children on ways to decrease the ionizing radiation exposure in children . There is information for parents that include basic information brochures that can be printed or downloaded that describe what is an xray, what are the risks and benefits, and what can be done to decrease these risks .