Preliminary measurements to the establishment of a quality control programme for the activimeter calibration reference system

Abstract

The nuclear medicine techniques efficiency and safety depends on, beside other factors, a quality control programme, mainly regards to the nuclides activimeter utilization. The Calibration Laboratory of IPEN uses as a work standard, a tertiary standard system Capintec, calibrated at the Accredited Dosimetry Calibration Laboratory of the Medical Radiation Research Center – University of Wisconsin. In this work, as preliminary measurements to establish a quality control programme for the activimeter calibration procedures, initially the repeatability and reproducibility (long term stability) tests were performed using a sealed check source of 133Ba. Later on, to complete this quality control programme other check sources (137Cs, 57Co, 60Co) will be used to perform the same tests. A series of 80 experiments of 10 measurements each has been carried out. The reference system showed a good behaviour to the repeatability test, considering the tolerance limits of 5%. The percent deviations of all tested sources in the activity measurements were lower 1% to 133Ba.