Speaker
Description
Authors: Lucrezia Spagnuolo 1,*, Marco Capogni 1, Aldo Fazio 1 and Pierino De Felice 1
Affiliation: 1 Istituto Nazionale di Metrologia delle Radiazioni Ionizzanti (INMRI)-ENEA, C.R. Casaccia - Via Anguillarese 301 I-00123 Roma
The Italian National Institute of Ionizing Radiation Metrology (INMRI) belonging to ENEA and located in the Casaccia Research Centre near Rome, has organized in 2022 a National Program for the promotion of the reliability of ionizing radiation measurements based on six Inter-Laboratory Comparisons (ILCs). The Program is funded by the Ministry of Economic Development (Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico, MiSE) as part of the initiatives and studies on controls on measuring instruments, in contexts of particular relevance for consumers with implications for health and safety.
In particular, the ILC n. 2 concerns the measurement of activity of short-lived radionu-clides of interest in nuclear medicine by means of activimeters (usually named “dose calibrators”). Precise and accurate measurements of the activity of such kind of ra-dionuclides is a deeply felt need in the country (and in the world), considering the nu-merous nuclear medicine centres that use radiopharmaceuticals for diagnostics and ther-apy and the numerous medical applications of radiopharmaceuticals.
The current legal and technical legislation requires that the instrumentation necessary to determine the activity and radiochemical purity of the radiopharmaceutical must be adequately shielded from the influence of environmental radiation and appropriately ca-librated. In addition, the activity of radiopharmaceuticals is required to be known with an uncertainty less than 10%.
To date, ENEA-INMRI has met numerous requests for calibration of activimiters, com-ing from individual production centers or from nuclear medicine centers in the country. However, a national inter-comparison (ILC) in this area has not yet been carried out.
Therefore, this ILC was necessary to ensure, for all the laboratories involved, the tra-ceability at national and international level to a common reference standard, for each radionuclide covered by the ILC, developed and maintained at ENEA-INMRI. In this way it will be possible to realize, for the laboratories concerned, the technical-scientific conditions to achieve adequate levels of accuracy and reliability in this kind of mea-surements.
The ILC n. 2 is focused on the verification of the preparation and measurement capabili-ties of a given short-lived radioactive source by each Participant Laboratory.
In particular, the physical quantity covered by the intercomparison is the activity, meas-ured in Bq, of the Tc-99m, F-18 and Lu-177 radionuclides. Each Participant Laboratory was left completely autonomy to participate in the intercomparison with one or more radionuclides among the previous three.
The analysis of the results is based on the comparison of the values of the measures, provided by each Participant Laboratory, with the reference value of the same measu-rand, provided by ENEA-INMRI.
