Investigation of radiation exposure of medical staff: Measurements supported by simulations with an articulated hand phantom

To evaluate and optimise extremity doses in nuclear medicine, work package 4 of the ORAMED project (ORAMED, 2011) focussed on investigating skin doses of nuclear medicine worker hands (Carnicer, 2010). In addition to a measurement campaign, selected scenarios were simulated by means of hand wax phantoms. The phantoms were modelled according to the scenario of radiopharmaceutical syringe handling. The wax phantoms in the position of interest were scanned and introduced as lattice (voxel) geometry into the simulation input geometry. In this article the mathematical articulated hand model developed at KIT (Blunck et al., 2009) is compared to these models. This mathematical hand phantom consists of rigid and flexible elements, allowing for an adaptable anatomy and flexible hand poses. In contrast to the static voxel models obtained by a complex procedure based on CT-scanned images, the articulated hand phantom can be used comparably simply for differing scenarios.

► Investigation of extremity doses of medical staff.
► Focus on radiopharmaceutical syringe handling.
► Simulations using two different hand phantoms are compared to measurements.
► The articulated mathematical hand phantom allows for a facile change in geometry.
► The positioning accuracy of monitoring points and source location is important.