According to a report by a Canadian expert, children are being exposed to excessive amounts of radiation when they have a CT scan.
Ontario's auditor general Jim McCarter has said in a report that in almost 50 per cent of the cases he studied, hospitals did not reduce the exposure setting when children took the high-tech diagnostic exam.
McCarter says because children's organs are more sensitive to radiation than those of adults, a child who has a CT scan on their abdomen using an adult setting is exposed to eight times the radiation an adult would be exposed to in the same setting.
The findings are part of the auditor general's annual report.
McCarter says research has shown that increased exposure to radiation, over time, can cause radiation-induced cancers.
His report criticises Ontario hospitals for not analyzing the number of CT scans adults and children are receiving or monitoring the doses of radiation received by each patient.
He says he has come across 58 children who received more than one CT scan a year, 14 who had more than three scans a year and one child had 6.
According to McCarter up to 20 per cent of cases, in adults and children are getting CT unnecessarily.
He also says some medical staff were not aware that CT scans expose patients to significantly more radiation than a common X-ray and while both British and American hospitals have guidelines about how much radiation a patient should receive, Ontario does not.
He has also found cases of radiologists who were not wearing dosimeters, a protective device that measures their own level of radiation exposure.