Dicentric Telescoring as a Tool to Increase the Biological Dosimetry Response Capability during Emergency Situation

Biological Dosimetry is a necessary support for national radiation protection programs and emergency response schemes. The Latin American Biological Dosimetry Network (LBDNet) has standing experience in biological dosiemtry network activities with several intercomparison exercises showing almost homogeneous results.. One way to increase the network response, overcoming the difficulties associated whit blood or slide transport is the scoring of dicentric on a computer monitor using electronically transmitted images i.e. the dicentric telescoring. This procedure remove the difficulties associated with the dispatching and reception of “physical” samples and is probably the most immediately way of share the scoring load among laboratories working in network. Here we present the results of two exercises organised by the LBDNet to test the efficiency of such an approach. During the first exercise, the participant laboratories analysed the same images derived from cells exposed at 0.5 Gy and 3 Gy; In the second exercise an emergency situation was tested, each laboratory was required to score 50 different images in 2 days extracted from 500 downloaded images derived from cells exposed at 0.5 Gy. Then the remaining 450 images had to be scored within a week.The conclusion is that dicentric telescoring seems to be a promising technique for population triage in a large scale accident.