Abstract
The cornerstone of child abuse imaging is the skeletal survey, but initial imaging with radiographs may not demonstrate acute and non-displaced fractures, especially those involving the ribs. Given the high mortality of undiagnosed non-accidental trauma, timely diagnosis is crucial. CT is more sensitive in assessing rib fractures; however the effective radiation dose of a standard chest CT is high. We retrospectively identified four children (three boys, one girl; age range 1–4 months) admitted between January 2013 and February 2014 with high suspicion for non-accidental trauma from unexplained fractures of the long bones; these children all had CT of the chest when no rib fractures were evident on the skeletal survey. The absorbed radiation dose estimates for organs and tissue from the four-view chest radiographs and subsequent CT were determined using Monte Carlo photon transport software, and the effective dose was calculated using published tissue-weighting factors. In two children, CT showed multiple fractures of the ribs, scapula and vertebral body that were not evident on the initial skeletal survey. The average effective dose for a four-view chest radiograph across the four children was 0.29 mSv and the average effective dose for the chest CT was 0.56 mSv. Therefore the effective dose of a chest CT is on average less than twice that of a four-view chest radiograph. Our protocol thus shows that a reduced-dose chest CT may be useful in the evaluation of high specificity fractures of non-accidental trauma when the four-view chest radiographs are negative.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1072-1076 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Pediatric Radiology |
Volume | 45 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 1 2015 |
Keywords
- Chest
- Child abuse
- Computed tomography
- Infants
- Non-accidental trauma
- Rib fractures
- Ribs
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging
- Pediatrics, Perinatology, and Child Health