Ionizing Radiation Measurement Solution in a Hospital Environment

Abstract

Ionizing radiation is one of the main risks affecting healthcare workers and patients worldwide. Special attention has to be paid to medical staff in the vicinity of radiological equipment or patients undergoing radioisotope procedures. To measure radiation values, traditional area meters are strategically placed in hospitals and personal dosimeters are worn by workers. However, important drawbacks inherent to these systems in terms of cost, detection precision, real time data processing, flexibility, and so on, have been detected and carefully detailed. To overcome these inconveniences, a low cost, open-source, portable radiation measurement system is proposed. The goal is to deploy devices integrating a commercial Geiger-Muller (GM) detector to capture radiation doses in real time and to wirelessly dispatch them to a remote database where the radiation values are stored. Medical staff will be able to check the accumulated doses first hand, as well as other statistics related to radiation by means of a smartphone application. Finally, the device is certified by an accredited calibration center, to later validate the entire system in a hospital environment.

Review of proposed different irradiation methods to inactivate food‐processing viruses and microorganisms

“…Alpha particles are unable to reach the outer layer of dead human skin cells, but they are capable of causing significant cell damage if an alpha‐emitting material is consumed in food or air. As a result, in the food industry, this form of radiation is rarely used for packaging and disinfection (Garcia‐Sanchez et al., 2018 ).…”

“…Since neutrons lack the ability to actively ionize an atom due to their lack of charge, they are most generally indirectly ionized by being absorbed into a stable atom, causing it to become unstable and more likely to emit ionizing radiation of another kind. In fact, neutrons are the only form of radiation capable of making other materials radioactive (Garcia‐Sanchez et al., 2018 ). Radiation inactivation of viral pathogens using neutrons has potential applications in sterilization and the processing of biological reagents, including noninfectious viral antigens.…”

Construcción de un prototipo de contador Geiger Müller como apoyo dosimétrico en la vigilancia de radiaciones ionizantes

“…La estructura del prototipo tiene un diseño que permite ser asequible por el bajo costo de sus componentes, siendo un valor agregado para el laboratorio donde este opere, ya que dado su control en los niveles de radiación les permite estar al día en la reglamentación y acceder sin problemas a sus respectivas licencias para su operación, así mismo lo plantea en [26] donde plantean una solución en dosimetría en tiempo real en el ambiente hospitalario a través de tecnología de bajo costo y desarrollo libre, encontrando resultados óptimos y viables para la aplicación en la protección de los trabajadores expuestos.…”

iTRAQ-Based Proteomic Profiling of Potential Biomarkers in Rat Serum for Uranium Tailing Suspension Intratracheal Instillation

“…The damaging effects of ionizing radiation on organisms can be either somatic effects on the irradiated organisms themselves or genetic effects on offspring . High-dose irradiation can cause acute damage to individuals in the short term and is easy to detect, whereas low-dose radiation does not generally cause acute reactions in individuals and is often ignored. , With the wide application of nuclear energy and radioisotopes in various fields, the harm of low-dose radiation to the environment and human health has received increasing attention and new requirements for protection from such radiation have been proposed. , The damage caused by radiation to organisms is a complex multilevel, multistep, and multistage process . We performed pathological analysis of rat lung tissues with various instillation doses and found some alveolar edema, alveolar wall capillary dilatation and hyperemia, alveolar septum widening, and severe exudate and neutrophils in the alveolar cavity of the 1.25 and 2.5 mg/mL dose groups.…”