@thesis{jasonActivityDeterminationNuclear2025,
	title = {Activity Determination in Nuclear Medicine Using Radionuclide Calibrators},
	url = {https://zenodo.org/records/18458894},
	doi = {10.5281/zenodo.18458894},
	abstract = {In recent years, the treatment of patients in nuclear medicine using exotic radionuclides (particles that send out ionizing radiation) formulated in pharmaceuticals for patient administration has gained a lot of attention. With that, the need for better assessments of treatment effectiveness has increased as well. At the root of these challenges lies the accuracy with which the radioactive pharmaceuticals are measured. Inaccuracies could lead to treatment failures, adverse effects or misinterpretations of effectiveness in preclinical studies and should be avoided. In this study, a solution of a particularly interesting radionuclide (terbium-161) has been put in various vials, syringes and tubes to see how well the amount of radioactivity that is measured coincided with the amount of radioactivity that was put in the container. The amount of radioactivity was measured using a device commonly referred to the ”radionuclide calibrator” or (”activity meter”). For two vials, the concentration of radioactivity (i.e. amount of activity per 1 gram of solution) has been verified using a second device referred to as the ”gamma counter”. The results are striking. For the syringes and tubes, the amount of radioactivity that was measured is up to 30\% higher than what was actually present. The vials, on the other hand, had the measured radioactivity be much closer to what was in the vial. It was also found that for most containers, the items that were used to perform the measurements (to hold the container in the detector, for example) caused the measured radioactivity to deviate from the actual amount as well. The measurements using the gamma counter are promising. The amount of radioactivity per 1 gram of solution was the same as was expected. This means that this second device may proof useful in the future as a tool to verify the amount of radioactivity that was present in a container. However, there were some obstacles observed due to (unavoidable) contaminants present in the solution that make it harder to conduct the measurements. To conclude, the results indicate that the old ”one-size-fits-all” approach that is the dominant approach in nuclear medicine is outdated. Special care and attention must be brought to how to accurately measure the novel radionuclides that are coined to be the (cancer) treatments of the future. Not doing so may lead to large errors that could have been avoided.},
	institution = {Zenodo},
	type = {phdthesis},
	author = {Jason, Noben and Kristof, Baete},
	urldate = {2026-02-04},
	date = {2025},
	keywords = {thesis},
}