Radiation dose of nuclear medicine technicians performing PET/MR

J Radiol Prot. 2020 Sep;40(3):861-866. doi: 10.1088/1361-6498/aba082.

Abstract

Since october 2015, PET/MR has been used extensively for clinical routine in the nuclear medicine department of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris, France) with a throughput of 11 to 15 patients each day. While many studies have been conducted to investigate dose reduction strategies to patients with hybrid PET/MR devices, no study has focused on staff radiation safety. Knowing that patient positioning within the scanner takes longer in PET/MR than in PET/CT because of the placement of several local MR receive coils, a retrospective study was carried out to measure the radiation doses to nuclear medicine technologists from the patient. The analysis was conducted during one year on 1332 clinical PET/MR studies performed with the Signa PET/MR system (General Electric Healthcare) in our department. The whole-body exposure of the technologist staff was on average for all PET/MR exams10.3 ± 4 nSv per injected MBq of 18 F. When performing brain PET/MR exams only, the whole-body exposure was on average 8.7 ± 2 nSv per injected MBq of 18 F. Brain PET/MR provides lower radiation dose than whole-body examinations for cancer screening due to a lower injected activity (2 vs. 3 MBq kg-1) and shorter patient positioning (5 vs. 15 min). When starting PET/MR in a nuclear medicine department, an important step is to optimise patient positionning within the scanner to minimise radiation dose received by the technical staff from patients.

MeSH terms

  • France
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Multimodal Imaging*
  • Nuclear Medicine*
  • Occupational Exposure / analysis*
  • Occupational Exposure / prevention & control
  • Patient Positioning*
  • Positron-Emission Tomography
  • Radiation Dosage*
  • Radiation Protection / methods*
  • Radiopharmaceuticals / administration & dosage
  • Retrospective Studies

Substances

  • Radiopharmaceuticals