effect of silicone rubber-lead (sr-pb) thickness on dose reduction and image quality as gonad shield

Background: some organs in the body are sensitive to radiation such as eyes, breast, and gonads. protection of sensitive organs against radiation is necessary. recently, many sensitive organ shields have been developed from different materials. objective: the aim of this study is to evaluate the dose reduction and image quality from implementation of silicone rubberlead (srpb) as an alternative gonad shield in digital radiography (dr).material and methods: in this experimental study, the srpb gonad shields with various thicknesses of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 mm were synthesized. this study used the pb percentage of 5 wt%. an anthropomorphic phantom was used in abdomen plain examinations. the results obtained from the use of the srpb was compared with standard gonad shield, i.e. lead apron. to measure the dose reduction, the piranha detector was used. the image quality assessment was evaluated with the signaltonoise ratio (snr) and the contrasttonoise ratio (cnr). results: this study showed the dose reduction was significant for all srpb thicknesses, and incrementally increased with the increase of the srpb thickness. the minimum and maximum of dose reduction were 22.8% for 2 mm and 66.9% for 10 mm srpb, respectively. conclusion: compared to the reference image without gonad shield, the snr and cnr do not significantly change. hence, the srpb is probably to be used as an alternative gonad shield.