Communicating radiation exposure: a simple approach.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this article is to provide a general method to help explain radiation exposure to patients presenting for nuclear medicine procedures. The concept is to convert the effective dose from any nuclear medicine procedure to the equivalent time in months or years to obtain the same effective dose from background radiation. METHODS The effective dose of each common diagnostic nuclear medicine procedure was obtained from the literature and the corresponding background equivalent radiation time (BERT) was calculated assuming an average background radiation of 3 mSv/y. RESULTS A table of the BERT has been compiled for common nuclear medicine procedures. CONCLUSION The BERT table provides a simple approach to help physicians and technologists effectively communicate radiation exposure information and perhaps potential radiation risk.