Doses to patients in interventional cardiology

The growing number of interventional procedures in cardiology, as well as their increasing complexity level, require more attention to be paid to doses delivered to patients and to operators. In this paper the focus is on doses to patients. Due to an appropriate use of protective devices, the workers have kept their personal doses within the recommended levels. At the Cath. Lab. of the Heart Centre of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen there are 7 angiography units of the latest model, all of them equipped with a dose area product meter (DAP). A computerized data base archive is operating from 1998. The DAP values of more than 51.000 coronary angiographies, more than 18.000 percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) and more than 700 congenital heart diseases have been examined. DAP values have been evaluated versus intervention complexity levels, patients' body mass indexes and operators. Interventions with particularly high DAP values have been looked at separately. As expected there is correlation of DAP values with complexity indexes and patients body masses. There is also a clear difference related to the various operators, showing that there is room for improvement in the creation of awareness regarding radiation doses.