Performance characteristics of a novel radioactive isotope detection and notification system designed for use in hospitals.

Recently, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Cancer Centers has installed an Emergency Department Notification System (EDNS) in one of its hospitals. This system, manufactured by Thermo Fisher Scientific (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., 81 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02454), was designed to discriminate non-medical radioactive isotopes from medical radioactive isotopes routinely used in nuclear medicine and radiation treatments. It is modular in nature and consists of four NaI(Tl) scintillation detectors, a 512 channels multi-channel analyzer, a system controller, and a database-monitoring server. A series of tests were carried out to evaluate the performance characteristics of this system using a variety of radioactive sources of varying activities. These included measurements of minimum detectable activity, detector response distance to various source activities, detector response to different speeds of a moving radioisotope, and single and multiple radioisotope identification and classification. Measured results show that the system is capable of identifying radioactive sources of nominal activity 0.13 MBq (3.5 μCi) and higher in a relatively short period of time (<11.1 s). The database-monitoring server could send an alarm signal to appropriate personnel when the analysis of the results indicated the presence of a non-medical or threat radioisotope. The present paper reports these results.