Effective dose to adult patients from 338 radiopharmaceuticals estimated using ICRP biokinetic data, ICRP/ICRU computational reference phantoms and ICRP 2007 tissue weighting factors

Background: Effective dose represents the potential risk to a population of stochastic effects of ionizing radiation (mainly lethal cancer). In recent years, there have been a number of revisions and updates influencing the way to estimate the effective dose. The aim of this work was to recalculate the effective dose values for the 338 different radiopharmaceuticals previously published by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP).

Method: The new estimations are based on information on the cumulated activities per unit administered activity in various organs and tissues and for the various radiopharmaceuticals obtained from the ICRP publications 53, 80 and 106. The effective dose for adults was calculated using the new ICRP/International Commission on Radiation Units (ICRU) reference voxel phantoms and decay data from the ICRP publication 107. The ICRP human alimentary tract model has also been applied at the recalculations. The effective dose was calculated using the new tissue weighting factors from ICRP publications 103 and the prior factors from ICRP publication 60. The results of the new calculations were compared with the effective dose values published by the ICRP, which were generated with the Medical Internal Radiation Dose (MIRD) adult phantom and the tissue weighting factors from ICRP publication 60.

Results: For 79% of the radiopharmaceuticals, the new calculations gave a lower effective dose per unit administered activity than earlier estimated. As a mean for all radiopharmaceuticals, the effective dose was 25% lower. The use of the new adult computational voxel phantoms has a larger impact on the change of effective doses than the change to new tissue weighting factors.

Conclusion: The use of the new computational voxel phantoms and the new weighting factors has generated new effective dose estimations. These are supposed to result in more realistic estimations of the radiation risk to a population undergoing nuclear medicine investigations than hitherto available values.