Radiation doses in cardiac angiographic procedures

The benefits from cardiac angiographic procedures are enormous. They can prove to be life saving in many situations. The utility of such angiographic procedures is unquestionable. What matters is, can the doses be reduced even if they are not alarming from the point of view of deterministic effects? In the authors' study they observed that the doses are not reaching the level of deterministic effects particularly for skin injuries. Keeping in mind the stochastic effects and associated ALARA principle, every attempt to reduce the dose is welcome. The maximum problem is encountered in convincing the cardiologists that they need training in radiation protection. While cardiologists are afraid of the small amount of radiation from a radioactive stent, they invariably they fail to pay heed to X-rays, which are taken hundreds of times, and have a higher radiation intensity than the radioactive substances used in stents. There does appear to be scope for dose reduction, and here training methodologies might be useful.