What type of Dosimeter is best for Nuclear Medicine Departments?
Text Box: Implicit in this question is the issue of whether a film badge or thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) would best meet the personnel occupational radiation monitoring needs.  Studies involving film badges have shown that, for a typical Nuclear Medicine department,  due to the range of energies and angles that strike the film badge, the calculation performed typically concludes that the radiation  field behaves like a mixture of high energy X-rays and gamma rays. Unfortunately, the processed film also shows a blended filter pattern, which makes it very difficult to accurately determine optical densities beneath each individual filter. This blending of the filters, and the wide range of energies which may strike the badge from a multitude of angles, results in a significant overestimation of the exposure. By contrast, TLDs do not exhibit this type of blending and hence provide an inherently more accurate determination of the exposure and are the recommended dosimeter type for use in Nuclear Medicine applications.   It may be appropriate to consider supplemental technology such as electronic personnel dosimeters (EPDs), real-time area monitoring, and stack/effluent monitoring equipment for specialized nuclear medicine applications such as elution of generators, use of cyclotrons to produce radiopharmaceuticals, etc.