This month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published new x-ray standards for all federal facilities that use diagnostic and interventional X-ray equipment. Developed by the Interagency Steering Committee on Radiation Standards (ISCORS) Work Group, Federal Guidance Report No. 14: Radiation Protection Guidance for Diagnostic and Interventional X-Ray Procedures offers
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Anti-Radiation Drug Could Work Days after Exposure
Scientists have developed a new drug candidate, DBIBB, that drastically reduces the death rate in irradiated mice even days after exposure. Led by Gábor Tigyi of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the team based the drug off of lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), “a naturally occurring signalling molecule that seems to
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Ischemic Heart Disease in Workers at Mayak PA: Latency of Incidence Risk after Radiation Exposure
A study on workers from the Mayak Production Association, a nuclear facility that produced plutonium for the Soviet Union, found that the main detrimental health effects of radiation exposure happen more than thirty years after the exposure. At the facility, workers were exposed to low and medium doses at low dose
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Low-Dose Radiation Research Act of 2015
As reported in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the House of Representatives recently passed a bipartisan bill that aims to reignite research in low-dose radiation. Driven by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, the Low-Dose Radiation Research Act of 2015 tasks the U.S. Department of Energy
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Medical Imaging Tests
Curious which medical procedures use radiation? As a part of their Speak Up™ patient safety initiative, The Joint Commission published an infographic on the different kinds of medical imaging tests available. The chart gives an overview of each test’s process and uses, as well as precautions patients should take. Full
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Advantages of Scanning Primates vs. Mice
Dr. Catharine Paddock’s article for Medical News Today, “PET scans can help select best TB drugs for trials,” reveals advantages of scanning primates versus mice due to similar disease profiles shared by human and primate. In a study led by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, linezolid, a drug developed
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Radiation Dose Chart
Radiation dose is measured in sieverts (Sv), but how much radiation does one sievert actually represent? To put it into perspective, here is an infographic that visualizes the amount of radiation absorbed from different sources.
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PET Advantages in Oncology
President of Radiological Technologies Universities, Brent D. Murphy, MS, DABR, underscores the efficacy of PET and champions increased utilization of PET in oncology. In the linked presentation, Dr. Murphy illustrates PET advantages in both sensitivity (the probability of a positive test, given that a patient is ill) and specificity (the probability of a
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Performance Evaluation of the Trans-PET® BioCaliburn® LH System
Abstract The Trans-PET® BioCaliburn® LH is a commercial positron emission tomography (PET) system for animal imaging. The system offers a large transaxial field-of-view (FOV) of 13.0 cm to allow imaging of multiple rodents or larger animals. This paper evaluates and reports the performance characteristics of this system. Methods: in this
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Basic Types of Radiation
From SciShow‘s miniseries IDTIMWYTIM (“I Don’t Think it Means What You Think it Means”), this fun video gives a basic overview of the different types of radiation beyond ionizing radiation and where they are found in real life.
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