Design of a Novel Shield of Nuclear Medicine with New Alloy

Background: Protecting patients and healthcare workers from harmful ionizing radiation, has been an important concern. Due to high efficacy, for many years, lead has been used as the best choice for this purpose. Lead has been always considered as a traditional choice to protect both workers and patients from any unnecessary exposure to ionizing radiation. Recently there has been a great deal of concern expressed about the toxicity of lead. The aim of this study was to design a novel shield for nuclear medicine with different alloy as a desired replacement for traditional lead base protectors.

Methods: A combination of Cadmium, Bismuth, Lead (only 15%) and Copper were selected by studying metals and calculation of metals’ HVL by Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport Code (MCNP4C) modeling.

Results: The results of the tests were evaluated and determined that the designed shield, considerably reduces the received dose by a thousand times and this alloy with 2 mm thickness is equivalent to that of a 20 mm traditional lead shield.

Conclusion: This novel shield that is produced with lesser lead in this study is considerably safer and offers effective protection in diagnostic energy ranges and may replace the traditional lead-based protectors.