Uncertainty induced by chest wall thickness assessment methods on lung activity estimation for plutonium and americium: a large population-based study

Abstract

In vivo lung counting aims at assessing the retained activity in the lungs. The calibration factor relating the measured counts to the worker’s specific retained lung activity can be obtained by several means and strongly depends on the chest wall thickness. Here we compare, for 374 male nuclear workers, the activity assessed with a reference protocol, where the material equivalent chest wall thickness is known from ultrasound measurements, with two other protocols. The counting system is an array of four germanium detectors.It is found that non site-specific equations for the assessment of the chest wall thickness induce large biases in the assessment of activity. For plutonium isotopes or 241Am the proportion of workers for whom the retained activity is within ± 10% of the reference one is smaller than 10%.The use of site-specific equations raises this proportion to 20% and 58% for plutonium and 241Am, respectively.Finally, for the studied population, when site-specific equations are used for the chest wall thickness, the standard uncertainties for the lung activity are 42% and 12.5%, for plutonium and 241Am, respectively. Due to the relatively large size of the studied population, these values are a relatively robust estimate of the uncertainties due to the assessment of the chest wall thickness for the current practice at this site.