BACKGROUND Low back pain (LBP) has a prevalence of 84% in Africa. The commonest form of imaging is plain lumbar spine x-ray. It gives a radiation dose equivalent to 65 times a chest x-ray dose and sends one of the highest doses to the human reproductive organs. The commonest cause of LBP in Africa is degenerative disease. X-ray findings do not change mode of treatment yet most physicians still ...

BACKGROUND Within the medical facilities provided by state healthcare services, a universally applied technique for patient diagnosis and treatment relies on ionising radiation; for example in radiotherapy and X-ray (ie. examination). Human exposure to such radiation is not however entirely free of associated health risks. OBJECTIVES To determine and estimate the numbers and types of X-ray ba...

Background This study performed to assess the efficacy of ultrasound in screening upper and lower extremities fractures in comparison with standard X-ray in pediatric trauma patients. Materials and Methods This was a prospective diagnostic study conducted at the emergency department of Imam Khomeini Complex Hospital, Tehran, Iran. All patients with the age under 18-year-old admitted with limb t...

Tuberculosis in older children has been well described; however, its description in infants is very limited. There are a few studies of infants with tuberculosis in the literature. In this study from February 2007 to May 2009, cases of infantile tuberculosis investigated retrospectively. Thirteen patients with pulmonary tuberculosis detected. Mean age of the patients was 168.8 days. The most fr...

PURPOSE The accurate prediction of x-ray spectra under typical conditions encountered in clinical x-ray examination procedures and the assessment of factors influencing them has been a longstanding goal of the diagnostic radiology and medical physics communities. In this work, the influence of anode surface roughness on diagnostic x-ray spectra is evaluated using MCNP4C-based Monte Carlo simula...

Background: It has recently been shown that the particle size of materials used for radiation shielding can affect the magnitude of radiation attenuation. Over the past years, application of nano-structured materials in radiation shielding has attracted attention world-wide. The purpose of this study was to investigate the shielding properties of the lead-free shields containing micro and nano-...

BACKGROUND Elderly female patients complaints of acute low back pain (LBP) may involve vertebral fracture (VF), among which occult VF (OVF: early-stage VF without any morphological change) is often missed to be detected by primary X-ray examination. The current study aimed to investigate the prevalence of VF and OVF and the diagnostic accuracy of the initial X-ray in detecting OVF. METHOD Sub...

INTRODUCTION We report the case of a missed fracture through the body of the hamate bone, only detected on a later, mistakenly taken 30° oblique x-ray view. This case highlights some of the problems encountered with traditional x-ray views, and the need to consider oblique views as either standard procedure or as an adjunct where clinical suspicion remains high even in the presence of normal x-...