On October 15, 2020 Cancer Research Center of Toulouse reported that Coordinated by the European Biomedical Imaging Research Institute (EIBIR, Austria), the H2020 MEDIRAD project (View Source) is based on a consortium of 33 partners representing 14 European countries (Press release, Cancer Research Center of Toulouse, OCT 15, 2020, View Source [SID1234568499]). This project aims to explore the effects of low-dose exposure in medicine.
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More generally, the MEDIRAD project will improve the scientific basis and practice of radiation protection in medicine, with the aim of preventing the risks associated with repeated exposure to low doses of radiation (e.g.: cardiovascular risks following radiotherapy treatment of breast cancer/ long-term risks of tomography treatments in children and adolescents, etc.).
Among the applications concerned is the use of iodine-131 for the treatment of thyroid cancers (WP3 – coordinator: Glenn Flux). Team 15 of the CRCT (responsible: Pr M. Bardiès) is involved in this project (dosimetry axis), and the IUCT-Oncopole is the only French institution to participate in clinical research (coordinator: Pr F. Courbon).
As a reminder, iodine-131 has been used to treat thyroid cancers for over 80 years, with excellent results. However, this practice raises the question of the potential risks to healthy organs away from the treated area. A network of expert centres capable of producing standardised scintigraphic imaging data has been set up within MEDIRAD to enable the precise determination of the doses absorbed by healthy organs during these treatments, first step in assessing the risks associated with treatment.
In this perspective, four European centres (including the IUCT-Oncopole) initially compared their scintigraphic image acquisition systems (five in total), according to three main criteria: detector sensitivity, contrast recovery coefficients and dead time. The objective was to provide elements of camera parameterization methodology for each of the models analyzed and to ensure the standardization of acquisitions and associated processing. These results, preliminary but essential for the continuation of the project, were published this month in The European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.