Survey or quality for radiopharmaceuticals and activimeters available in services of nuclear medicine from Recife, Pernambuco State, Brazil

The radiopharmaceutical used in Nuclear Medicine must present high chemical and radiochemical purities in order to obtain images with contrast and clearness adequate for the diagnosis. Test should be made by the Nuclear Medicine institutes to evaluate the presence of molybdenum, aluminium and the free Tc O4-/TC-HR in the radiopharmaceutical before they use it. On the other hand, the activity to be administered to the patient is determined by the activimeters available in the Nuclear Medicine institutions. So it is necessary to perform tests to verify operating conditions of the activimeter to guarantee that the dose received by patient is the prescribed by the physician. In Brazil, few clinics of Nuclear Medicine are implanting the tests of the radiopharmaceutical and of the activimeters. The objective of this work is to establish the procedures for the radiopharmaceutical tests and to evaluate the quality of the radiopharmaceutical used at the clinics of Recife, as well as the operation conditions of the activemeters in these institutions. The results show that all the activimeters analyzed present a good performance and that the equipment with Geiger-Muller detectors present larger instability than the ones that use ionization chamber. Concerning the Mo/Tc generators, it was observed that only one presented Mo in the generator eluate with concentration over the acceptable limits and that the concentration of Al found in the samples analyzed were below the limits. On the other hand, in 73% of the MIBI analyzed samples were observed problems with its preparation that were caused by the procedures adopted at the clinics, which do not follow the manufacturers recommendations. (author)