Dosimetry for Radiopharmaceuticals in Therapy and AI Applications

Nuclear medicine is a specialized discipline of medicine administering radionuclides and compounds to diagnose and treat various diseases and cancers. There are about 35 million patients worldwide, of which 9 million in Europe, receiving nuclear medical procedures every year. Advanced molecular imaging technologies, such as PET and SPECT, together with CT and MRI are able to detect tumors and diseases online for further treatment. In addition to the benefit of the treatments, the radiation dose is a fundamental quantity for radiation protection, risk assessment and treatment planning to the patients, medical staff and the public, and the environment. EURADOS has many years of experience about the radiation protection in medicine; and EURADOS has embarked on several projects with other nuclear medicine associations since its establishment in the 1980s’. As a result of the EURADOS strategic research agenda 2020, the nuclear medicine dosimetry was identified and put as a solid and independent challenge parallel to the radiation therapy and medical imaging dosimetry for the next decades. Concurrently, radiopharmaceutical therapy in nuclear medicine is undergoing a renaissance and the EC Directive 2013/59/Euratom states in article 56 that exposures of target volumes in nuclear medicine treatments shall be individually planned. The new established EURADOS pilot group aims to develop patient dosimetry methods and monitoring radiation exposure and engage in radiation protection in the nuclear medicine research field together with international and European associations. Based on the EURADOS strengths in radiation dosimetry, this group invited four esteemed professors in the medical physician, medical physical and computer scientific field to guide us in the direction of dosimetry of radiopharmaceutical therapy and application of artificial intelligence in the quickly developed nuclear medicine field.