2021 Volume 24 Issue 2 Pages 120-127
The 2018 revision of the IEC 60601-2-54 established that X-ray equipment should provide distinct the examination protocols for three types of physiques to reduce the radiation exposure in children.
In order to establish these three physique indices, we extracted information （age, height, weight） of patients imaged between January 1st and December 31st, 2018, from their electronic medical records, and performed clustering using the k-means method.
The radiograph parts of interest were the head, chest, abdomen, hip joint, elbow joint, and knee joint, and while the three variables could be clearly separated for the chest, abdomen, elbow joint, knee joint, there was an overlap for hip joint. As only the results for chest were similar to the data from Ito et al., we propose using distinct examination protocols based on the three physique indices of 0.5 years, 4.0 years, and 8.5 years when performing X-ray equipment of paediatric patients.
