Radiation conditions for computerized tomography: determination and comparison

Radiology is the practice in which radiation beams, usually radiation X are used to produce an image of the human body in order to obtain a diagnosis, for example, to evaluate a pathological condition by computerized tomography (CT). Although the computerized tomography diagnostic potential is unquestionable, caution must be taken because the doses are almost always higher than the observed in conventional radiology procedures. The ionization chamber used for dosimetry in CT is a unsealed cylindrical chamber with 10 cm and 15 cm of sensitive length. A typical characteristics of this camera is its uniform response to radiation incident at all angles around its axis. The revised edition of IEC 61267 (2005) brought as an innovation the radiation conditions for computed tomography, RQT, that simulate non-attenuated beam and are used in special CT applications. This study aims to establish the necessary conditions to obtain radiation pattern beam computed tomography, RQT, and a calibration laboratory implementation for pencil ionization chambers used in the beam dosimetry produced by these scanners in the Metrology National Laboratory of Ionizing Radiation (LNMRI). In the implementation of RQT conditions we were found that the ratio of kerma rates in the air, with or without additional filtration equivalent to the first HVL (half-value layer), are in accordance with IEC 61267 (2005), which provides a range between 48.5% and 51.5% for each quality. The LNMRI characterized the radiation conditions of RQT series (IEC, 2005), obtaining a percentage of 49.6% for the RQT 8, 50% for the RQT 9 and 50,4% for the RQT 10. With the substitution of the total additional filtration RQT qualities, composed by Al + Cu and by a total filtration composed by copper (Cu) only, it can be seen the emergence of a similar RQT quality named Quality Copper Tomography - QCT. The results of the calibration, the RQT and QCT qualities, had expanded uncertainties with a confidence level 95.45%, less then 4%. Studies of copper as attenuating material were very useful, making possible the implementation of QCT quality similar to RQT. Within results obtained for the equivalence curves between Al and Cu filtrations, it was found that copper could be used as material in the construction of the attenuation curve. (author)