Improvements in extremity dose assessment in ionizing radiation medical applications

Full text: Whole-body personal dosimetry is well established for the individual monitoring of radiation workers. Legal dosimetry is usually based on TL or film passive dosimeters worn on the trunk and evaluated by an authorised dosimetric service. However, although extremity and skin dosimetry is required by law for any practice where extremities or skin are the critical organs, the development of extremity dosemetry has not been as well established. Only a few European dosimetry services offer this service. Moreover, there is hardly any recommendation on the most suitable place for wearing this type of dosemeter. The present paper aims at testing the INTE-UPC ring dosemeter based on MCPNs and TLD-100 detectors on some users from the field of medicine, namely manual brachytherapy operators, nuclear medicine technologists from a radiopharmaceutical unit, personnel at a cyclotron facility with the corresponding FDG synthesis cells, radiographers and surgeons participating in interventional radiology. The staff were chosen due to the fact that they had a significantly high risk of exposure to their hands. According to previous results, MCPNs TL thin material is used in the radiology measurements, whereas TLD100 is preferred for the other applications. Prior to use, the dosemeters were tested for waterproof and cold sterilisation sensitivity. Preliminary results confirm the need to implement extremity dosimetry in the above- mentioned jobs, where finger dose can be of the order of 40 times the whole body dose and 3 times the wrist dose. Selection of an appropriate dosemeter can mean changes in the classification of the worker as category A or B. The study shows good correlation between workload and integrated dose, and small differences between experienced workers' dose. As a conclusion, some guidelines for radiation protection optimization are presented. (author)