Ricerca Progetti nazionali, regionali, internazionaliNAZIONALIPRIN 2022Design and building of a setup

Design and building of a setup for the detection of beta emitter contaminants in radiopharmaceutical drugs in medical diagnostics

This proposal concerns both design and implementation of a portable device for the detection of - emitting contaminants in radiotracers used in medical diagnostics from Nuclear Medicine imaging.

The latter deals with both tomographic and planar imaging techniques which gives the spatial distribution of a molecular probe, labeled with a radionuclide selected between a wide range of possible choices, and injected into the patient body for a variety of diagnostic purposes. After the injection, the outcoming radioactivity is registered by specific energy and space sensitive detectors displaced outside the patient body; for this reason the use of radionuclides having a emission associated to their + decay are in order.

Within the radiopharmaceutical, the presence of pure - emitter contaminants (which decay from ground state to ground state) constitutes an additional and unnecessary (therefore potentially injurious) dose supplied to the patient. As a second major concern it negatively affects the image quality.

In many cases, the contaminants are due to the manufacturing method of the radiopharmaceutical itself. In presence of pure - emitters, a method currently used to estimate their activity is based on the measurement of the Bremsstrahlung Radiation produced by electrons in an absorber. The very low counting rate of this radiation, compared to the emission of the primary radionuclide, leads to a semi-quantitative result only, moreover affected by high numerical uncertainties. The project hereinafter presented deals with the development of a detection system peculiarly oriented to the analysis of radiotracers implemented in Nuclear Medicine diagnostic imaging. The main objective of such a detector is to highlight the presence of possible contaminants inside the radiotracer, as well as to improve their quantitative evaluation by increasing both the sensitivity and the specificity of the measurement beyond the standards currently available.

The detector object of the proposal will consist of i) a hollow inner cylinder made of scintillating plastic material for detection and of an ii) outer cylinder composed of inorganic scintillators devoted to radiation detection. The radiopharmaceutical sample to be analysed will be housed in the hollow part of the internal cylinder to ensure high detection efficiency. Signals from the scintillators will be acquired in anticoincidence (or coincidence depending on the type of contaminant to be identified). Given the activity of the radiopharmaceutical, that can be finely tuned with standard laboratory techniques, the expected coincidence rate is presumed to be high enough to obtain a rapid characterisation of the samples.

 

Data di avvio 16 Ottobre 2023

Data di completamento 16 Ottobre 2025

Total cost  €125277,00

 

Progetto 2022MMTJ4T finanziato all’interno del Bando PRIN 2022 di cui al Decreto Direttoriale n. 104 del 02/02/2022 nell’ambito del Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, Missione 4 – Componente 2. Dalla Ricerca all’Impresa - Investimento 1.1 Fondo per il Programma Nazionale della Ricerca (PNR) e Progetti di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN), finanziato dall’Unione europea – NextGenerationEU – CUP B53D23020470006