Radiation dose monitoring

Goal of radiation monitoring and method of data extraction

Younger people are more affected by radiation overdoses when compared to older people with the exposure of only one Sievert of radiation putting the person at about 5% risk of suffering from fatal cancer (Kostyleva & Mysev, 2009). Cancer is one of the deadliest conditions ever witnessed in the world with the rates of morbidity and mortality increasing day by day. As such, it is important for the clinicians and other healthcare workers concerned with the use of radiation in the diagnosis of certain diseases to regulate the doses administered to achieve therapeutic or diagnostic goals (Marbaniang et al., 2009).

Furthermore, excessive dosage of radiations in therapy or diagnosis does not produce significant colour or smell changes to signal any overdose making it important to use dose monitoring devices and programs to minimise the harm caused by such an overdose (O’keeffe et al., 2008). The radiation dose-monitoring indicator produces a signal to indicate signs of overdose for the clinician to withdraw the therapeutic administration of radiations. The CT dose index is a device used to assess the patient dose exposure following a scan of the distance and dose-length product obtained through CTDIvol X scan length. The monitoring indicator provides the calculation of the entrance skin dose shortened as ESD for the supine and erect abdomen when digital radiography is performed in HA healthcare facilities (Volkov et al., 2013). Most vendors retain their calculation of the exposure index that is eventually retrieved to provide feedback on the detector dosage levels.

The radiation data can be extracted using graph theoretical algorithms, which use the gene networks to obtain data related to the radiation overdose. The genes with common roles in the body show correlated expression levels, which may be useful in the identification of interacting genes from microarray data (Ziajahromi et al., 2014). The massive matrix co-expression is the primary target for the extraction of data on the genes that are co-expressed in the study of cancer development occurring because of radiation overdose.