This article reviews the essential considerations in planning and designing nuclear medicine departments. There are four proposed categories to consider as ‘shielding commissioning factors’ (SCF). The first SCF: ‘Patient flow optimisation and workload’ emphasises the importance of carefully considering patient flow in the departmental design, which would impact the cost of the shielding and the management of radioactive patients. The second SCF: ‘Equipment and space allocation’ discusses the principles of space allocations in the department for cost-effective designs. The third SCF: ‘Shielding calculation methods’ reviews the methodologies of shielding calculations in nuclear medicine to offer a standardised approach. The fourth SCF: ‘Shielding integrity’ reviews the plan to inspect, eyewitness and verify shielding integrity. All discussions were supplemented by practical examples. Overall, this article aims to be a practical manual which health or medical physicists can use when providing counsels to the design committee.
Standardized uptake value (SUV) is an advanced tool for quantitative tumor identification and metabolic target volume delineation (TVD) in diagnostic and therapeutic settings. It is thus important to establish a quality assured process to maintain the traceability of data correctly by positron emission tomography (PET) systems. Patient administration of 18fluoro-deoxy-glucose is increasingly delivered by automated infusion systems (AISs). Whenever AIS is used, its accuracy and traceability measurement need verification. In addition, it was observed that the unreproducible SUV displayed in PET and the treatment planning system (TPS) may cause grave concerns for radiation oncologists for TVD. This concern may complicate the correlation of TVD on PET and TPS and their clinical reporting. The SUV traceability was established from the PET system to AIS. Its accuracy was verified by cross-referencing to the reference dose calibrator traceable to a primary standard. The SUV values were converted in TPS using the in-house “clinical tool” to be identical as in PET, to allow radiation oncologists to use SUV confidently. The outcome of this study enables the clinical groups to rely on the correct SUV values displayed on the TPS and to improve the quality of care for patients in clinical procedures.
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