High-Yield Cyclotron Production of Metallic Radioisotopes for Nuclear Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main purpose of LARAMED project (LAboratoty of Radioisotopes for MEDicine), founded at LNL-INFN, is the R&D on cyclotron production of conventional, such as Tc-99m (TECHN-OSP projects), and emerging, such as Cu-67 (COME project), metallic medical radioisotopes. The aim of my PhD has been the development, optimization and automation of post-irradiation target processing systems, enabling to recover in high yield highly pure radioisotopes (RI), one of the most critical steps in the RI cyclotron production.\nThe possibility of a reactor-produced molybdenum-99 shortage, used as parent nuclide of in 99Mo/99m Tc generators, is still a potential scenario. The direct cyclotron-production of Tc-99m through the (p,2n) reaction on a Mo-100 target seemed to be a reliable solution. In the framework of TECHN-OSP project, a technology for enabling the in-hospital cyclotron self-production of Tc-99m, in order to afford the availability of the most used radiometal in diagnostic applications in case of shortages, has been developed. The Tc-99m cyclotron-production optimization included the design of a solid target, the development of an automatic module for target processing and enriched target material recovery study. In this thesis, the description of Tc-99m production experiments, performed in collaboration with the Sant’Orsola Hospital in Bologna, and the development of the automatic module for target processing, are well detailed.\nDuring my PhD I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Canadian research group at TRIUMF (Vancouver, CA), also working on Tc-99m cyclotron-production, by contributing at the optimization and automation of molybdenum target dissolution and purification procedure of cyclotron-produced Tc-99m. In this thesis a comparison between the two developed, Italian and Canadian, target processing setup is also reported.\nAlongside that, I have collaborated to COME project whose purpose is the evaluation of the cyclotron production efficiency of Cu-67, a particularly interesting RI for its application in “theranostics”. The large scale cyclotron-production of this RI is still a poorly studied key point. In order to define the Cu-67 best cyclotron-production route, we focused our attention on unknown cross-section measurement of nuclear reactions on a Zn-70 target (35-70MeV energy range). Essential for this project was the development and optimization of a high yield separation and purification procedure of Cu-67 from the Zn-70 bulk and the co-produced Ga-67 contaminant that, having the same γ-lines of Cu-67 (both decay to Zn-67 with similar half-lives), poses a serious issue for the determination of the activity of Cu-67. The description of the experiments, performed in collaboration with ARRONAX, is reported in this thesis.\nFinally, the clinical needs of larger amount of the PET radiometal generator-produced Ga-68 prompted TRIUMF Life Sciences division to investigate Ga-68 cyclotron-production from liquid target since it is based on the existing medical-cyclotron network and technology. This technique will improve the availability of Ga-68 in hospitals housing an appropriate cyclotron by making them independent self-producers. Since the major problem affecting liquid targets is the contamination with radioactive/stable metals (e.g. iron) coming from the dissolution of some material from vacuum isolation or target body components during the irradiation, a separation and purification procedure together with a semi-automatic system, particularly focused on the purification of Ga-68 from Zn and Fe, have been developed. The main purpose is to obtain a final product suitable for medical use and to enable radiolabeling and in-vivo imaging studies with cyclotron produced 68Ga-DOTATOC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".