IDEAS internal contamination database: a compilation of published internal contamination cases. A tool for the internal dosimetry community

Full text: The aim of the IDEAS project was to develop general guidelines for the assessment of internal dose from monitoring data. The project was divided into 5 work packages for the major tasks. Work package 1 dealt with the collection of incorporation cases. To ensure that the guidelines were applicable to a wide range of practical situations, a database was compiled of cases of internal contamination, which include monitoring data suitable for assessment. Following a survey of the open literature a bibliographic database was set up. This database contains references dealing with problems related to cases of internal contamination. The references from this database were checked and if an article contained monitoring data suitable for dose assessment, these data were introduced in the IDEAS Internal Contamination Database. To facilitate data entry, information on a case is entered in a spreadsheet, which is sent to the database manager for incorporation in the database. The layout of the spreadsheet itself has a potential value as a standardised format for information on internal contamination cases. The IDEAS Internal Contamination Database now contains more than 200 cases of internal contamination. Each record consists of a case description (work area, characteristics of work, initiating event, action taken, element and main radioisotope involved, chemical form and physical characteristics, and other comments), data concerning the monitoring results (from urine, faeces, whole-body, thyroid, lung, wound) and, when available, dose assessment results. The dose assessments originate from the author of the paper or from intercomparison exercises, as some of these cases have been used in European intercomparisons of dose assessment. In work package 3 about 50 cases from the database were evaluated, many of them by two IDEAS partners independently, in order to identify issues which needed to be addressed in the general guidelines. In the near future, the IDEAS Internal Contamination database will be made available to the internal dosimetry community. The database has several potential applications, including: training, testing biokinetic models, testing software for calculating intakes and doses from bioassay data, comparison of data from a new accidental intake with that from previous exposures to similar materials. The database is by no means complete, and this presentation is also an appeal for internal contamination cases to extend and update it. (author)