Radiation Dose Assessment in Nuclear Medicine

Radiation dose assessment in Nuclear Medicine, plays a pivotal role in dose-planning of the cancer patients, who undergo radionuclide therapy at nuclear medicine centres. In nuclear medicine it is desirable to assess the benefits and risks from a particular nuclear medicine procedure, and assure that the benefits accrued from the procedure outweigh the radiation related risks. This assessment can only be performed provided one knows the radiation dose delivered to the patient for the given nuclear medicine procedure. This chapter describes the basics of nuclear medicine radiation dosimetry, role of professional bodies viz., ICRP and MIRD committee in the development of nuclear medicine dosimetry, ICRP and MIRD methodology for estimating the equivalent/absorbed dose to the organs at risk and target organs/tumors, different terminologies used by ICRP and MIRD while estimating the dose to the organs/tumors, and different types of softwares used in calculating the radiation dose to the organs/tumors. In this chapter, the challenges and the factors which influence the accuracy of the radiation dose assessment are discussed briefly. This chapter concludes that a fully personalized dose approach based on patient-specific measurements is important for minimizing the radiation effects to the normal organs and maximizing the radiation effects to the cancer cells to achieve the therapeutic window.