Radiation safety in pediatric CT scan

CT scan has a significantly increased usage for diagnosis of pediatric diseases in the two last decades, so as which about 11% of all annual performed CT scans in the United States belong to these age groups. Therefore, this has resulted in an increase of radiation dose in the pediatric patients and its potential side effects. This is a review article and was performed with a search on Web of Science, Google Scholar, Science Direct and PubMed databases using the keywords radiation, CT scan, pediatrics and ALARA. Relevant review articles were collected, studied and summarized. Several studies have shown low dose radiation in pediatric patients leads to increase lifetime chance of malignancies. Recently, several methods have been provided to reduce the radiation dose in pediatric population both by decreasing the number of performed CT scans and also by optimization the scanner parameters while keeping the reasonable image quality. Other imaging modalities like ultrasound exam and MRI do not have harmful radiations and where possible, CT scan should be substitute by these methods. Ultrasound exam in most situations is the primary imaging method for children. With regard to the increasing usage of CT scan in pediatric age groups and its potential harmful radiation, knowledge about and implementation of preventive means to reduce the radiation is necessary.