Malfunction junction

Are you always second guessing just how much you should be veering from an ideal radiation plan in order to minimize potential damage to an implanted device? Here is a handy review of a variety of devices from cardiac to hepatic to neural and the clinical significance of radiation doses to each as well as recommendations on how to lower exposure when needed. On one end of the spectrum there are pacemakers and defibrillators that are not only critically important devices but also have electric circuits extremely sensitive to high-energy photons. Then there’s hepatic pumps and pain pumps where a malfunction would be more annoying than life-threatening and would only result from battery exposure to quite high radiation doses. Check out table 1 for other examples.