Active Personal Dosimeter in a Nuclear Medicine Center in Yazd City, Iran

Introduction: active personal dosimeters (apds) are well accepted as usefuland reliable instruments for individual dosimetry measurements. apds have manyadvantages compared with passive dosimeters for individual external radiation doseassessments. in routine monitoring, occupational exposure is carried out for verificationand demonstration of compliance with the regulatory dose limits. so, it is oneof the most important tools in order to achieve or demonstrate the level of radiationprotection.methods: yazd province has only one private nuclear medicine (nm) center. inthis center, two nm technologists exposed to radioactive patients during radiopharmacuticalspreparation were monitored. nm technologists have to be close to thepatient during radiopharmaceutical injection and patient positioning on the gammacamera table. an electronic personal dosimeter dkg-21 ecotest made in ukrainewhich records the ambient dose equivalent rate and equivalent dose was used tomonitor the radiation exposure to the technologists and to record the accumulationdose in msv throughout a working day. this study was accomplished between thetime period of january to june 2011. the dosimeter is designed to measure individualequivalent dose hp(10). the dose range of gamma radiation was 0.01 msvto 1 sv and the energy range 0.05 to 6 mev which was suitable for nm procedures.the planar and tomography nm images were performed by the 2 technologists inthe morning and afternoon shifts.results: the average monthly occupational dose of each technologist was approximately0.6 msv. their annual doses were 6.6 and 8.8 msv, respectively. theywere lower than the maximum permissible dose of 20 msv/y. total number of nmprocedures performed in this nm center during june 2010 to june 2011 was 3265.conclusion: the use of apd for monitoring the nm technologists is a usefultool to check compliance with regulatory dose limits and radiation protectionprincipals.