Patient radiation dose and protection from cone-beam computed tomography

After over one decade development, cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has been widely accepted for clinical application in almost every field of dentistry. Meanwhile, the radiation dose of CBCT to patient has also caused broad concern. According to the literature, the effective radiation doses of CBCTs in nowadays market fall into a considerably wide range that is from 19 µSv to 1073 µSv and closely related to the imaging detector, field of view, and voxel sizes used for scanning. To deeply understand the potential risk from CBCT, this report also reviewed the effective doses from literatures on intra-oral radiograph, panoramic radiograph, lateral and posteroanterior cephalometric radiograph, multi-slice CT, and so on. The protection effect of thyroid collar and leaded glasses were also reviewed.