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itishappy 5 days ago

It's roughly 40 min per workday over a typical year. That's a bit high but not unreasonably so.

uh_uh 5 days ago | parent [-]

That would amount to 10 mrem of radiation per year. I don't believe this is a realistic estimate for a CT scan though. From epa.gov [1]:

- Head CT: 2.0 mSv (200 mrem)

- Chest CT: 8.0 mSv (800 mrem)

- Abdomen CT: 10 mSv (1,000 mrem)

- Pelvis CT: 10 mSv (1,000 mrem)

So for a head CT, one would need to spend more than 13 hours per workday in the station. OP was off at least an order of magnitude.

https://www.epa.gov/radiation/frequent-questions-radiation-m...

riahi 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

This data is from 2006. Over 20 years, there has been substantial progress in CT radiation reduction through model-based iterative reconstruction and now ML-assisted reconstruction, aside from iterative advances in detector sensitivity and now photon-counting CT.

In clinical practice, those doses are about 2-3x what I see on the machine dose reports every day at my place of work.

In thin patients who can hold still, I've done full-cycle cardiac CT and achieved a < 1 mSv dose. We are always trying to get the dose down while still being diagnostic.

Source: Practicing radiologist.

itishappy 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Fair enough. That was the first number I pulled from Google, but I trust your source a good deal more.