Evaluation of the contamination droplet model used for the assessment of skin dose during the manipulation of radiopharmaceuticals

Abstract

Abstract The manipulation of radiopharmaceuticals in nuclear medicine can result in the droplet contamination of operators resulting in the accumulation of a significant skin dose. Current methods to estimate this skin dose often utilise a 50 μl cylindrical droplet model, which can lead to unrealistically high estimated skin doses for some radiopharmaceuticals. By conducting experiments to measure the volume of real droplets arising from simulating the manipulation of radiopharmaceuticals, this work found that 50 μl is an overestimation of a realistic contamination droplet. For almost all radiopharmaceuticals considered in this work, incorporating a smaller droplet volume into skin dose simulations resulted in higher estimates of skin dose rate per unit of activity, which, when combined with appropriate activity concentrations and droplet volumes, resulted in lower skin doses for contamination droplet incidents. The results presented in this work challenge the 50 μl contamination droplet volume and highlight the importance of having an accurate model when estimating the skin dose for contamination scenarios.