Use of computational modeling to evaluate the medical and occupational exposure during interventional cardiology procedure

Interventional cardiology (IC) is a common modality that uses fluoroscopic images for the diagnosis and therapy of cardiovascular problems. While modern fluoroscopy equipment presents dose reduction systems, as well as collimated beams, the scattered radiation reaches surrounding patient organs that are not located in the primary radiation beam. Scattered radiation throughout the patient body will result in occupational exposure of the interventionist physician. The evaluation of occupational and medical exposure is important in assessing the risk and biological consequences in different organs and tissues. In this work, the evaluation was done through the concept of conversion coefficient (CC). To determine the CC values, the MCNPX computational program and the adult male virtual anthropomorphic phantom (MASH3) were used to represent the patient and the physician. The results proved the efficiency of the protection of suspended equipment. When not used, an increase in the CC values to effective dose may be larger than 1000%. (author)