• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.135-135
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• 2006

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.185-196
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• 2005

Although medical exposure from diagnostic radiology procedures such as conventional x-rays, CT and PET scans is necessary for healthcare purposes, understanding its characteristics and size of the resulting radiation dose to patients is much of worth because medical radiation constitutes the largest artificial source of exposure and the medical exposure is in a trend of fast increasing particularly in the developed society. Annual collective doses and per-caput effective doses from different radiology procedures in Korea were estimated by combining the effective dose estimates per single medical procedure and the health insurance statistics in 2002. Values of the effective dose per single procedure were compiled from different sources including NRPB reports, ICRP 80, MIRDOSE3.1 code and independent computations of the authors. The annual collective dose reaches 27440 man-Sv (diagnostic radiology: 22880 man-Sv, nuclear medicine: 4560 man-Sv) which is reduced to the annual per-caput effective dose of 0.58 mSv by dividing by the national population of 47.7 millions. The collective dose is far larger than that of occupational exposures, in the country operated 16 nuclear power plants in 2002, which is no more than 70 man-Sv in the same year. It is particularly noted that the collective dose due to CT scans amounts 9960 man-Sv. These results implies that the national policy for radiation protection should pay much more attention to optimization of patient doses in medicine.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.87-100
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• 1990

For the quantitative evaluation and assessment of radiation exposure from terrestrial component of natural environmental radiation, successive thermoluminescence dosimetry and periodical in-situ gamma ray spectrometry were carried out for a period of 24 months. LiF PTFE dise TLDs and $3&{\phi}{\times}3'$cylindrical NaI(Tl)scintill ation detector in association of portable multichannel analyzer (4096 ch) were used in this study. The doses measured were evaluated and assessed in terms of effective dose equivalent. As a concomitant output, the dose equivalent due to ionizing component of cosmic ray was able to be evaluated. According to the results obtained in terms of variance weighted mean, the annual effective dose equivalents of terrestrial gamma ray and cosmic ray ionizing component in Taejeon area came out to be $564{\pm}4\;{\mu}Sv(64.8{\pm}0.5nSv{\cdot}h^{-1}$ and $300{\pm}2\;{\mu}Sv(34.3{\pm}0.2nSv{\cdot}h^{-1}$, respectively, which are reasonable comparably with that appeared in UNSCEAR Report[28]as per caput annual effective dose equivalent in 'areas of normal background radiation'.