The Reading Room Podcast: Current Insights on Recent Research About Radiation-Induced Cancers with CT Scans, Part 2

While recently published research raised concerns about projections of future radiation-induced cancers from computed tomography (CT) scans, Joseph Cavallo, M.D., maintained in a new podcast that advances in technology may continue to facilitate lower radiation dosing with CT.

“Whether it's the photon-counting CT machines or AI post-processing algorithms, there are multiple avenues to lower dosing … It's not going to be a one size fits all, or a silver bullet. It's going to be a combination of different technologies on the machine side, on the software side, that help us continually make these examinations safer and improve the risk benefit profile moving forward,” noted Dr. Cavallo, an assistant professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine in Boston.

Highlighting significant reductions with cardiac CT radiation dosing in recent years, Mahadevappa Mahesh, MS, Ph.D., also challenged perceptions about overuse of CT scans in the emergency room setting.

“Generally, emergency room physicians get the bad rap (with the perception that) they're ordering too many studies. … If we look (at this) closely, emergency room physicians, radiology, everybody (is) working with such a time-compressed timeline, and they're trying to save the patient. … As a medical physicist, I am all for radiation dose reduction, but at the same time, I am also a proponent of never tying anybody's hand because of radiation, even in the cath lab. If you have to do the procedure, do it,” asserted Dr. Mahesh. the president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), and a professor of radiology and radiological sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

(Editor’s note: For related content, see “The Reading Room Podcast: Current Insights on Recent Research About Radiation-Induced Cancers with CT Scans, Part 1,” “What New Research Reveals About Computed Tomography and Radiation-Induced Cancer Risk” and “Nine Takeaways from New Research on CT Scans and Radiation-Induced Cancers.”

For more insights from Dr. Cavallo and Dr. Mahesh, listen below or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.