Radiation dose in pregnancy

Due to the high radiosensitivity of the fetus and embryo, diagnostic imaging procedures for pregnant patients raise health concerns. Therefore, the authors of this work set out to develop a methodology for automated construction of patient-specific computational phantoms based on actual patient CT images with the aim of achieving accurate estimate of conceptus dose.

Key points

• The conceptus dose during diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine imaging procedures for pregnant patients raises health concerns owing to the high radiosensitivity of the developing embryo/fetus.
• The proposed methodology allows automated construction of realistic computational models that can be exploited to estimate patient-specific organ radiation doses from radiological imaging procedures.
• The dosimetric results can be used for the risk-benefit analysis of radiation hazards to conceptus from diagnostic imaging procedures, thus guiding the decision-making process.

Article: Estimation of the radiation dose in pregnancy: an automated patient-specific model using convolutional neural network

Authors: Tianwu Xie and Habib Zaidi

Written by

European Radiology