We are writing to provide additional details regarding the article published by Hui et al. (Radiation dose of digital radiography (DR) versus micro-dose x-ray (EOS) on patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis: 2016 SOSORT- IRSSD “John Sevastic Award” Winner in Imaging Research, Scoliosis Spinal Disord. 2016 Dec 29;11:46. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13013-016-0106-7.). X-ray filters using copper or aluminum eliminate undesirable low-energy photons which affect the effective dose due to the change of energy spectrum of the X-ray beam and tissue absorption. The dose calculated by simulation using PCXMC 2.0 in this article was solely based on using parameters provided in Table 2 of Hui et al. 2016 which included only a 0.1 mm copper filter; the inherent 1.5 mm aluminum filter was omitted. We recalculated effective dose with the additional (aluminum) filtration, and this showed that the average effective dose for the EOS micro-dose protocol would be increased from 2.6 μSv as shown in Table 3 of Hui et al. 2016 to 3.1 μSv similar to the results obtained by Dr. Pedersen and colleagues as both copper and aluminum filters were applied (P. Pedersen, A. Greval and S. Eiskjær, personal communication, July 12, 2017). We suggest using both filters in simulations to determine results that best reflect real circumstance if other investigators plan to conduct similar studies.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Pedersen, Dr. Eiskjær, and Dr. Greval from the Aalborg University Hospital, Aalborg, Denmark, for their comments to improve the overall accuracy of our simulation process.
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