Is it possible to do radiopharmaceutical quality control with a gamma camera

All of the imaging studies in nuclear medicine start with a suitable radiopharmaceutical preparation step. In radiopharmaceutical synthesis, an organic or biochemical molecule is combined with a radioactive element to form a complex. This process is known as radiolabeling (1). In a radiopharmaceutical labeling study, it is important to realize that whether or not the radiolabeled chemical complex is in the expected radiochemical form has a vital role for all the nuclear medicine imaging processes. The common method of radiopharmaceutical quality control is the chromatographic analysis such as PC, TLC, and HPLC. In nuclear medicine practice, application of these methods is called radiopharmaceutical quality control(2). The agrement of results obtained from such chromatographic analysis methods with the criterions given in United States Pharmacopea (USP) means the regulatory permission of the use of that radiopharmaceutical in proposed applications(3). In this study separation of several labeled radiopharmaceuticals were demonstrated by using standard support materials and solvents. After dying the chromatographic support material, a gamma camera (TOSHIBA GCA-602A) was used to do radiation counting and static imaging for 2 minutes. These images, then, was divided into rectangular pieces (5 x 25 in pixel) and Region of Interest (ROI) process was applied to them. The percent labeling yields were calculated by plotting total count for each area against the number of area. It was also demonstrated that the Rf values obtained from gamma camera studies were in agreement with the Rf values obtained with classical methods