The evolution in experience of the operators together with the continuous improvement of devices have allowed new procedures that we did not perform a few years ago and that we never imagined possible, not even for the most enthusiastic of interventional cardiologists.
Not a huge intellectual effort is required to say that the future will continue inexorably in the same direction. The same is happening in other specialties besides cardiology where surgery is being performed on increasingly complex cases.
However, it is logical that the progresses of science are not all positive news. More complex procedures take longer and automatically have higher radiation doses not only for the patient but also for medical and non-medical operators in the room.
In this sense, we believe it’s beneficial to highlight our concern about this issue in a multi-disciplinary framework group dedicated to radiation protection in interventional cardiology within the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) based in Vienna, Austria. Writing about “Recommendations on occupational radiation protection in interventional cardiology”, it was decided to focus in the first instance on professional care and leave care of the patient until later.
We tried to write a practical approach where operators and ward staff can identify the most useful radiation protection measures and hope that their knowledge will influence an adequate prevention of stochastic as well as deterministic effects in the future. It gave us real satisfaction when a prestigious magazine, “Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions”, accepted our work for publication and, as such, we want to share this with all SOLACI partners.
Dr. Ariel Durán, FACC
SOLACI Radiation Safety Committee
Ariel Durán
