RESUMEN
This work is focused on radiation protection in the PET Centre Prague. The personal year dose equivalents of physicians, technologists and lab-technologists in the period 1997-2000 are presented. Dose equivalents are listed for each group as collective, mean and maximum dose equivalents and number of people in the evaluated group. There is an increase in the dose equivalents in 1999 when the PET scanner was installed. Later on, when personnel was trained and better local shielding was used, the increase is not much higher even though the number of patients investigated per day doubled. The radiation field measurements showed that the radiation dose equivalent rate outside the controlled area is on the background level of about 0.17-0.18 mSv/hour.
RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Attenuation-corrected (AC) imaging frequently shows normal stress myocardial perfusion while non-corrected (NC) imaging shows hypoperfusion. The aim of the work was to assess whether it is necessary to continue with resting examination in this situation. MATERIAL AND METHODS: 121 consecutive patients had positive finding at AC and/or NC sestamibi stress myocardial imaging using E.CAM Profile system and resting examination was carried out. AC stress imaging was normal while NC imaging showed hypoperfusion in 29 cases. In one case this finding was reversed. In this group of 30 patients with AC/NC stress discrepancies, resting examination has not revealed any additional information in 28 cases. RESULTS: In 2 cases NC imaging, in contrast to AC, showed stress ischaemia. In one of these 2 cases coronarography was carried out with negative result. In the other case patient refused coronarography. CONCLUSIONS: The resting examination did not bring any benefits in 29-30 cases out of 30 (96.7 to 100.0%) patients with AC/NC stress discrepancies. If the results of this study are considered accordingly, in our group approximately one fourth of the resting examinations (29 to 30 out of 121) could be saved.
RESUMEN
Image co-registration requires special software, which is usually available for Unix workstations. This work presents two programs running under MS Windows, one for study co-registration and one for template creation. The co-registration can be done by minimising/maximising the count difference, squared difference, shape and mutual information. The quality of the fit can be estimated by evaluating the contours with different tools. The aligned images can be used for template creation. Both programs can be downloaded from http://www.homolka.cz/nm.
RESUMEN
The Department of Nuclear Medicine because of its scope does much more work with computers, data and communication technologies than other departments in the hospital. Finding an efficient and user-friendly way of collecting and handling data, presenting them to the rest of the hospital and storing them in archives is one of the important tasks currently being addressed. This article concentrates on a discussion of the features of data flow between the department and the hospital and the organization of data at the department. A possible solution of an information system dealing with text data and images is presented on the example of the Department of Nuclear Medicine-PET Centre located in the Na Homocle Hospital in Prague.