Radiation Principles and Safety
Interventional cardiology today without the use of x-ray technology cannot even be imag‐ ined. This is also true for medicine in general. The radiology era begins with the discovery of the x-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, on the November 8th 1895 (following the translit‐ eration conventions for the characters accentuated by 'umlaut', „Röntgen“ is in English spel‐ led „Roentgen“, and with that spelling is most often found in the literature). On that day he produced and detected for the first time the electromagnetic radiation in the wavelengths today known as the x-rays, for which he received the Nobel prize for physics in 1901 [1]. This was the start of radiology, which has developed tremendously over the years. In time, radiology adopted other forms of human body imaging (magnetic resonance, positron emis‐ sion tomography etc.), but even today the most radiologic studies in the world are per‐ formed using the x-rays, whether in the form of classic x-ray imaging, computer tomography, or various forms of fluoroscopy and/or fluorography, which is used in inter‐ ventional cardiology. The term 'fluoroscopy' depicts viewing of structures in real time, while 'fluorography' means that different methods of image aquisition and storage for later review are being used.