Proposal for Setting Guidance Levels on Entrance Surface Doses for Radiographic Examinations on Children in Japan

The purpose of this paper is to propose setting guidance levels on entrance surface dose for radiographic examinations on children in Japan. This proposal is based on the results of surveys conducted broadly on Japanese institutes. Each value of the entrance doses (the 1st quartile, median, the 3rd quartile, and mean) was calculated with the Numerical Dose Determination method (NDD). The difference between the values of the 1st quartile and the 3rd quartile for each part of all 7 subject parts of examination ranges from 2.7 times to 3.7 times among institutions. In some institutions, the values of the 3rd quartile appeared over ten times as many as the 1st quartile. We propose the guidance levels on entrance surface doses for the children's radiographic examinations to be the value of the 3rd quartile, which was calculated from the result of the surveys.