Radiation doses to patients from nuclear medicine examinations

Public Health Authority of the Slovak Republic, Bratislava The exposure of the population to ionizing radiation is rising rapidly, nearly exclusively due to increasing medical use of radiation, including diagnostic methods of nuclear medicine. In 2012 Public health authority of the Slovak republic (PHA SR) performed a survey about the population exposure from nuclear medicine procedures. The primary objectives of this survey were to assess the frequency of different nuclear medicine procedures, determine the average activities administered by nuclear medicine procedures and compare them with the national diagnostic reference levels and determine the annual collective effective dose to the Slovak population from nuclear medicine. The effective dose calculation was based on the methodology of the ICRP32, ICRP80 and ICRP106. In Slovak republic are 11 nuclear medicine departments. The collected data of activities administered by different procedures correspond to 100 % of nuclear medicine departments. The total number of procedures included in the study was 36 250. The most commonly performed procedure was bone scintigraphy (35.9%), followed by lung perfusion and ventilation scintigraphy (17.0%), static and dynamic renal scintigraphy (13.0%), whole-body positron emission tomography of tumors with PET radiopharmaceuticals (11.6%), myocardial perfusion (8.8%), thyroid scintigraphy (6.2%), parathyroid scintigraphy (2.1%), scintigraphy of tumors (2.1%), scintigraphy of the liver and spleen (0.8%), brain perfusion (0.7%) and examination of the gastrointestinal system (0.3%). (authors)