EFFECTIVE DOSE - HOW EFFECTIVE FOR PATIENTS

The question discussed in this paper is whether effective dose can ref lect the risk to patients from radiological procedures and can be used , for example, to optimise procedures and compare risks of various met hods, to define dose constraints, and to estimate the risks to individ uals or populations attributed to medical exposures. This report demon strates that the use of effective dose for patients could be misleadin g or even wrong due to inappropriate simplifications of the underlying biological mechanisms and inappropriateness of the weighting factors connected with the definition of effective dose for a given patient po pulation. We show that the choice of the most meaningful quantities to express patient exposure depends strongly on the respective situation .