Performance of several active personal dosemeters in interventional radiology and cardiology

Active personal dosemeters (APDs) are very useful instruments for optimizing radiation protection of workers and for increasing worker’s awareness of unexpected exposures. The challenge of monitoring personal equivalent doses with APDs in interventional fluoroscopy is that they must be sensitive to low energy photon beams and be able to record high dose rates. The aim of this work is to verify both the performance and the reliability of four active personal dosemeters (APDs) and one direct ion storage (DIS) dosemeter in typical X-ray radiation fields used during interventional radiology and cardiology (IR/IC) procedures. The values of the personal dose equivalent at a depth of 10 mm measured by the APDs are compared with the response of a whole body thermoluminescence dosemeter (TLD) as a reference dosemeter. The response is found to be satisfactory in the tested situations.