Estimation of patient radiation doses in nuclear medicine during bone scan

Abstract

Bone scan or bone scintigraphy is one of common procedures in routine nuclear medicine. Bone scan helps to diagnose and evaluate a variety of bone diseases, cancers and conditions using amount of radioactive materials called radiotracers. That it injected to the bloodstream. The purpose of this study was to estimation of the effective dose and radiation absorbed doses to 100 patients from three hospitals following bone scans examinations with Tc99m MDP by using gamma camera scanner. Dosisrad and RADAR software’s were used to estimate effective dose and absorbed organ doses in this study and was compared between them of effective dose calculated with both and effective dose calculated with the Dosisrad and RADAR software’s was 4.25 mSv and 3.86 mSv respectively The mean effective dose estimated in this study was 4.06 mSv. And this value was compared with different countries and world commissions and it was agreed with international values. The absorbed organ doses values obtained in this study were selected for much radiosensitive organs from gamma camera according to the injected activity of three centers (A, B and c) respectively was: bladder (34.1±2.91, 37.8±4.25and35.6±3.23), bone surface (44.8±3.71, 49.5±5.6 and 46.3±4.37), red marrow (6.5±0.52, 7.2±0.81and 5.4±0.48) mSv respectively. The results of this study may be useful to estimate and optimize the amount of activity that can be administered to patient during bone scan examinations and also showed the methods used in this study for effective dose and absorbed organ doses calculation by the Dosisrad and RADAR software’s.