New Standardized Radiopharmaceutical Dose Estimates

Objectives The RAdiation Dose Assessment Resource (RADAR) Task Force of the SNMMI has developed a complete set of standardized anthropomorphic phantoms for adults, children, and pregnant women. These phantoms are implemented in the OLINDA/EXM version 2 computer code for internal dosimetry calculations.

Methods We have entered biokinetic data from the various publications of the ICRP Task Group on Radiopharmaceuticals for dozens of radiopharmaceuticals in routine use in nuclear medicine into the OLINDA/EXM 2 code, and calculated organ doses and effective doses for these agents.

Results Doses for most organs did not change significantly, even though specific absorbed fractions for some organs are higher than for previous phantoms, due to the more realistic modeling of organ shapes and proximity. One exception is the pancreas, as the ICRP recommended mass changed by about 40%. As pancreas is not very important to effective dose calculations, however, effective doses for most radiopharmaceuticals did not change by more than 20%.

Conclusions This radiopharmaceutical dosimetry compendium will serve the nuclear medicine community well for many years to come, and places dose estimates together in one publication, so that users do not have to search through multiple ICRP publications to find the most current dosimetry, Users can easily incorporate this information into their daily practice; we hope to make this available online. In addition, doses for many new organs (e.g. eyes, esophagus, prostate gland) that were not previously available are provided and whenever significant new data become available they can be easily incorporated into this compendium.