A computational tool for evaluating the exposure risk in nuclear medicine treatments

Abstract

A computational tool was developed with the aim of evaluating radiation exposure levels corresponding to patients and other exposed people, such as medical staff or chaperones, during typical nuclear medicine procedures. The calculation system is based on Monte Carlo subroutines adapted from the code PENELOPE and devoted to perform energy depositionaccording to the user-defined set-up. The computation tool offers a comfortable and user-friendly graphic interface for results processing and visualisation. Relevant procedure features, such as treatment room and facility, spatial distribution, source and target phantom as well as radioisotope type, can be easily introduced to the calculation code; this emphasises the versatility and potential of the computational tool. The application of the developed system tosimple situations in nuclear medicine showed the reliability and feasibility of the proposed method. The obtained exposure risk maps proved to be useful to establish safe zones there where expositions do not exceed radioprotection tolerances.