Internal Radiation Dose and Modeling Codes in Nuclear Medicine: A Fresh Look at Old Problems

With these codes, basic dose calculations could be made in seconds instead of hours. Another purpose of these codes was to help standardize dose calculations using recognized models, phantoms, and dosimetry techniques. In nuclear medicine community, the aim is to perform calculations to obtain dose estimates for various organs of the body once the kinetics of a radiopharmaceutical agent is established. The administration of radiopharmaceuticals to humans for diagnostic, therapy or research purposes is a well-established and developing branch of the nuclear medicine practice. New methods and radiotracers are continually introduced. Accurate dosimetry for each investigation is needed to optimize the use of various alternative nuclear medicine techniques and to estimate the radiation exposure and risk from each procedure [5].