Health physics
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Preplanning and organization can facilitate the health physics response in the event of a medical radiation emergency. Anticipating the needs will allow for advanced assembly of needed information and supplies that would be useful in effectively responding to such events. Annual training of emergency care providers and an easy to read and understand poster will be of great benefit in guiding personnel until health physics arrives. Major events also need consideration, in advance, as they will place additional demands on health physics.
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The objective of this study was to establish a delayed air sampling method to verify the integrity of an existing HEPA filter system in a ventilated fume hood. (238U,232Th)O2 microspheres were generated to fabricate cement nuclear fuel pellets in a HEPA-filtered hood. To comply with the air effluent concentration limits by NRC, the capture efficiency of the HEPA filter was examined. ⋯ Utilizing a gas flow proportional counter, 212Pb was used as a surrogate to indicate any possible penetration of the (238U,232Th)O2 particles through the HEPA filter. Based on the experimental results, this delayed sampling method proved to be an easy and effective way to validate the integrity of the HEPA filter.
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Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Evaluation of patient and staff doses during various CT fluoroscopy guided interventions.
As CT scanners are more routinely used as a guidance tool for various types of interventional radiological procedures, concern has grown for high patient and staff doses. CT fluoroscopy provides the physician immediate feedback and can be a valuable tool to dynamically assist various types of percutaneous interventions. However, the fixed position of the scanning plane in combination with high exposure factors may lead to high cumulative patient skin doses that can reach deterministic threshold limits. ⋯ CT fluoroscopy doses are markedly higher than classic CT-scan doses and are comparable to doses from other interventional radiological procedures. They consequently require adequate radiation protection management. An important potential for dose reduction exists by limiting the fluoroscopic screening time and by reducing the tube current (mA) to a level sufficient to provide adequate image quality.
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Comparative Study
Domestic radon risks may be dominated by bystander effects--but the risks are unlikely to be greater than we thought.
Radon risks derive from exposure of bronchio-epithelial cells to alpha particles. Alpha-particle exposure can result in bystander effects when irradiated cells emit signals resulting in damage to nearby unirradiated bystander cells. Bystander effects can cause downwardly-curving dose-response relations and inverse dose-rate effects. ⋯ The analysis concludes that a naive linear extrapolation of radon miner data to low doses, without accounting for dose rate/bystander effects, would result in an underestimation of domestic radon risks by about a factor of approximately 4. However, recent domestic radon risk estimates (BEIR VI) have already applied a phenomenological correction factor of approximately 4 for inverse dose-rate effects, and have thus already implicitly taken into account corrections which we here suggest are due to bystander effects. Thus current domestic radon risk estimates are unlikely to be underestimates as a result of bystander effects.