Highlights
- •Nuclear medicine staff exposure data was measured with active personal dosimeters for five year period.
- •Assessment of occupational exposure and optimization helps to reduce health professionals radiation exposure.
- •Automatic injection/infusion systems allow significantly reduce personnel radiation exposure.
- •The study shows that personnel working in PET/CT department received lover doses in comparison with other studies.
- •Occupational exposure in a PET/CT were measured with two different automatic infusion systems.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this study was to measure the occupational exposure using active personal
dosimeters (APD) in the PET/CT department at different stages of the operation chain
i.e. radiopharmaceutical arrival, activity preparation, dispensing, injection, patient
positioning, discharge and compare the radiation exposure doses received using two
automatic injection/infusion systems. This paper also reflects optimization processes
that were performed to reduce occupational exposure.
Methods
Measured APD data were analysed for medical physicists, radiology technologists and
administrative staff from 2014 till 2018. For dispensing and injecting 18F-FDG, the automatic infusion/injection system IRIDE (Comecer, Italy) or the automatic
fractionator ALTHEA (Comecer, Italy) with wireless injection system WIS (Comecer,
Italy) were used. Radiation exposure optimization methods were applied during the
data collection period (installation of the transport port, patient management, APD
alarm threshold and etc.).
Results
Radiology technologists who perform injection procedures, regardless of the automatic
infusion system, received the highest radiation exposure dose. The average doses to
the radiology technologists per one study were 1.72 ± 0.33 μSv and 1.16 ± 0.11 μSv
with ALTHEA/WIS and IRIDE system, respectively. The average dose for accompanying
the patient to the PET/CT scanner and scan procedure was 0.52 ± 0.07 μSv. For the
medical physicists, the average dose was 0.29 ± 0.09 µSv. The measured dose for administrative
staff was 0.30 ± 0.15 μSv.
Conclusions
Occupational exposure can be effectively optimized by different means including staff
monitoring with APD, implementation of radiation safety culture and the usage of automatic
infusion systems.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: August 28, 2020
Accepted:
August 11,
2020
Received in revised form:
July 24,
2020
Received:
February 14,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 Associazione Italiana di Fisica Medica. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
