Dissemination of a primary standard of C for PET stack emission monitoring

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H C Phillips, J C J Dean and L C Johansson

National Physical Laboratory, Hampton Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 0LW, UK Author email address 24/26pt

Introduction
The growth of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has led to a rapid increase in the commissioning of new cyclotron facilities for the production of PET radionuclides. Regulatory compliance requires these facilities to monitor for airborne PET radioactive discharges and stack monitoring systems are installed for this purpose. NPL has recently developed a national primary standard for 11C using internal proportional gas counting. Gas standardised by this method has been used to calibrate a transfer instrument over the activity concentration range 1 MBq m-3 - 200 GBq m-3, thus enabling measurements of stack discharges from cyclotron units to be traceable to a national standard of radioactivity. This poster outlines the 11C standardisation technique and the calibration of the transfer instrument. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has well-established facilities for radioactivity measurements of radioactive gases, such as 3H and 85Kr and more recently 11C, using the internal gas proportional counting technique (Phillips et al., 2010). NPL also has experience in calibration of tritium and radioactive noble gas monitoring equipment with traceability to national standards of radioactivity. These capabilities have enabled the successful primary standardisation of 11 C as 11CO2 with a subsequent calibration of a transfer standard instrument to enable the dissemination of the standard to the user community. 11C, a positron emitting nuclide, with its 20 minute half-life was selected for the derivation of the primary standard and the calibration of the secondary standard transfer instrument.

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C dioxide gas is produced by the acidification of a bicarbonate solution (previously produced at a London cyclotron unit) in a closed gas-handling manifold. NaH11CO3 + 4M HCl = 11CO2 + H2O.

Water vapour is removed from the gas mixture by passage through a vessel immersed in a solution of solid carbon dioxide pellets in acetone at -80 C. The dried gas is transferred to the internal gas proportional counting system (Marouli et al., 2010).

NPL has internal gas proportional counting systems for performing primary measurements of radioactive gases. Each system consists of three cylindrical proportional counters connected in series. Within a system, all counters have the same diameter and differ only in length to permit corrections for possible end effects. A 76 m

diameter gold coated molybdenum anode wire is supported centrally by PTFE insulators mounted on the counter end flanges. The counters are contained within electrical and radiation shielding to reduce the effects of electrical noise and background radiation, respectively (Phillips et al., 2010).

P10 (90% argon, 10% methane) is used as the counting gas in the systems. The counters operate at the same potential with a single high voltage power supply. A dedicated threechannel amplifier system processes pulses from each counter. The amplifier system is current sensitive and produces NIM type counting pulses.

The amplifier has a non-extending dead time set to 5 s. A computer is used to increase the voltage in predetermined increments and to record the number of pulses produced. The count rate is measured as a function of anode voltage and plotted. A 100 V wide region towards the upper end of the counting plateau is typically selected for further measurements.

Plateaux were obtained with measurement periods of 2 to 10 s over the voltage range 2.6 to 2.8 kV. A spectrum of each counters response to 11C in P10 was obtained at the measurement voltage and an extrapolation performed between the amplifier threshold and zero energy to estimate the fraction of undetected pulses below the threshold. This method is similar in its approach to the correction for losses below the lower-level discriminator as described by Stanga et al. (2001). The measured count rate

was corrected for threshold losses and the activity concentration in the counting system determined. The activity derived from internal gas proportional counting was confirmed by measurements of 11C in an aliquot of the NaH11CO3 solution performed using a secondary standard re-entrant ionisation chamber that had been previously calibrated using absolute counting techniques (Woods et al., 2002).

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The rapid decay of 11C gives a response of the transfer instrument recorded from overloading to ambient background readings within a few hours. Hence an instrument calibration across the activity concentration range 1 MBq m-3 to 200 GBq m-3 was achieved.

The portability of the transfer instrument, the ease with which it could be attached to the NPL internal gas proportional counting system and its ability to be easily incorporated into a stack discharge system were important considerations in the selection of the transfer standard. The Lab Impex Systems CMS unit with a scintillation detector was chosen for these reasons.