Development of a methodology to determine optimized therapeutic doses of ¹³¹I for the treatment of hyperthyroidism

Several methods can be used to determine the activity of ¹³¹I to be administered for the treatment of hyperthyroidism. However, some of them do not take into consideration the dose absorbed by the thyroid, while others do not consider all the parameters necessary for dose calculation. The relationship between the dose absorbed by the thyroid and the activity administered depends basically on three parameters: mass of the organ, iodine uptake and effective half-life of iodine in the thyroid. Such parameters should be individually determined for each patient in order to optimize the administered activity. The objective of this work is to develop a methodology for individualized treatment with ¹³¹I in patients with hyperthyroidism of the Grave's Disease. A neck-thyroid phantom developed at the In Vivo Monitoring Laboratory of IRD, containing a known amount of ¹³¹I, was used to calibrate a scintillation camera and a uptake probe available at the Nuclear Medicine Center of the University Hospital of Rio de Janeiro and Instituto de Medicina Nuclear - IMEN, of Goiania. The optimization of the counting geometry was carried out by the determination of the characteristic curves of the view angle of the collimator-detector assembly. The view angle of the collimator-detector assembly presented values compatible with the size of the organ for distances of 25 cm (uptake probe) and 45.8 cm (scintillation camera). The calibration factors (in cpm/kBq) and the associated uncertainty related to these distances were (39.3 ± 0.78), (58.1 ± 2.38) to uptake probe SCT-13004 e 13002, respectively and 4.3 ± 0.17 to scintillation camera. The time period between 14 and 30 hours of the retention curve allows the calculation of the activity between those two points. It is concluded that the use of diagnose equipment available at the hospital (scintillation camera and uptake probe) has shown to be a suitable procedure in terms of effectiveness, simplicity and cost. (author)