Sami Sherbini

United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) regulations limit the dose to the skin to 500 mSv per year. This is also the dose limit recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). The operational quantity recommended by ICRP for quantifying dose to the skin is the personal dose equivalent, Hp(0.07) and is identical to NRC's shallow dose equivalent, Hs, also measured at a skin depth of 7 mg cm-2. However, whereas ICRP recommends averaging the dose to the skin over an area of 1 cm regardless of the size of the exposed area of skin, USNRC requires the shallow dose equivalent to be averaged over 10 cm. To monitor dose to the skin of the hands of workers handling radioactive materials and particularly in radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facilities, which is the focus of this work, workers are frequently required to wear finger ring dosimeters. The dosimeters monitor the dose at the location of the sensitive element, but this is not the dose required to show compliance (i.e., the dose averaged over the highest exposed contiguous 10 cm of skin). Therefore, it may be necessary to apply a correction factor that enables estimation of the required skin dose from the dosimeter reading. This work explored the effects of finger ring placement and of the geometry of the radioactive materials being handled by the worker on the relationship between the dosimeter reading and the desired average dose. A mathematical model of the hand was developed for this purpose that is capable of positioning the fingers in any desired grasping configuration, thereby realistically modeling manipulation of any object. The model was then used with the radiation transport code MCNP to calculate the dose distribution on the skin of the hand when handling a variety of radioactive vials and syringes, as well as the dose to the dosimeter element. Correction factors were calculated using the results of these calculations and examined for any patterns that may be useful in establishing an appropriate correction factor for this type of work. It was determined that a correction factor of one applied to the dosimeter reading, with the dosimeter placed at the base of the middle finger, provides an adequate estimate of the required average dose during a monitoring period for most commonly encountered geometries. Different correction factors may be required for exceptional or unusual source geometries and must be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The computer code VARSKIN is used extensively to calculate dose to the skin resulting from contaminants on the skin or on protective clothing covering the skin. The code uses six pre-programmed source geometries, four of which are volume sources, and a wide range of user-selectable radionuclides. Some verification of this code had been carried out before the current version of the code, version 3.0, was released, but this was limited in extent and did not include all the source geometries that the code is capable of modeling. This work extends this verification to include all the source geometries that are programmed in the code over a wide range of beta radiation energies and skin depths. Verification was carried out by comparing the doses calculated using VARSKIN with the doses for similar geometries calculated using the Monte Carlo radiation transport code MCNP5. Beta end-point energies used in the calculations ranged from 0.3 MeV up to 2.3 MeV. The results showed excellent agreement between the MCNP and VARSKIN calculations, with the agreement being within a few percent for point and disc sources and within 20% for other sources with the exception of a few cases, mainly at the low end of the beta end-point energies. The accuracy of the VARSKIN results, based on the work in this paper, indicates that it is sufficiently accurate for calculation of skin doses resulting from skin contaminations, and that the uncertainties arising from the use of VARSKIN are likely to be small compared with other uncertainties that typically arise in this type of dose assessment, such as those resulting from a lack of exact information on the size, shape, and density of the contaminant, the depth of the sensitive layer of the skin at the location of the contamination, the duration of the exposure, and the possibility of the source moving over various areas of the skin during the exposure period if the contaminant is on protective clothing.

Members of the public visiting hospitalized patients undergoing nuclear medicine procedures or brachytherapy are exposed to radiation emanating from the patient. The radiation protection staff at the hospital is responsible for ensuring that the doses to these visitors are kept as low as is reasonably achievable and are maintained below applicable regulatory limits. These limits are normally expressed in terms of the effective dose to the visitor. Direct measurement of the effective dose, however, is not feasible, and the use of a quantity that provides a reasonable estimate, referred to as a surrogate, is required. This study used Monte Carlo radiation transport calculations to examine the feasibility of using bedside survey results, in units of roentgens per hour, as a surrogate for estimating the effective dose to a person who may be present at the survey location. The Monte Carlo code used in this work was MCNP Version 5. In these calculations, both the patient and the visitor were modeled using modified Medical Internal Radiation Dose anthropomorphic phantoms. Radioactive material that emitted monoenergetic photons was located in several of the patient’s organs in turn, and the bedside exposure rates and the effective doses at the same location were calculated. The calculations were repeated for several visitor locations, both at bedside along the length of the bed, and at increasing distances from the bed. The ratios of the exposure rates to the effective dose rates at each location gave an indication of the utility of the exposure rate measurements in providing a reasonable estimate of the effective dose. The results indicated that the survey data provided estimates of the effective dose within recommended accuracy for many exposure situations, but underestimated the effective dose to the visitor for other situations, especially locations close to bedside and for lower energy radiations. Use of appropriate correction factors based on this work could improve the utility of the survey data for the underestimated situations, and the exposure rate data could still be used to estimate the dose to a visitor within recommended accuracy, provided the estimated dose does not approach too closely to the applicable limit.

The use of the personal dose equivalent H P(10), as measured by one or more dosimeters, in estimating the effective dose equivalent H E and the effective dose E was examined for situations in which a protective apron is worn by the monitored person during medical procedures. The photon energy range considered was between 0.03–1.0 MeV. Several methods recommended in the technical literature for this purpose were assessed and their ability to provide reasonable estimates for H E and E were compared. The assessments were theoretical and used Monte Carlo transport methods and an anthropomorphic phantom to calculate H E, E, and H P(10). The results showed that all of the recommended methods, using either one or more dosimeters, were applicable to this situation but that most gave good results only within limited photon energy ranges, outside of which they either considerably over- or under-estimated the doses. Some provided good estimates over the entire energy range considered.