HEP Colloquia 2022

by Dr Luciano Canton (INFN Padova)

Wednesday 22 Jun 2022, 14:30 → 16:30 Europe/Rome

Aula A (Department of Physics)

Nuclear-reaction theory as a research tool for innovative radioisotope production in nuclear medicine.

Nuclear data and nuclear simulations represent major players in optimizing the production routes of medical radionuclides.  The production data of all the commonly used diagnostic and therapeutic radionuclides are in general well known, but  research-oriented (i.e. innovative) radionuclides are much in need of nuclear data and good nuclear simulations to find production routes, for example, for non-standard positron emitters, to study slow biological processes and to quantify dose distribution to the patient’s organs. Rapidly increasing interest arises also in internal radiotherapy and the interesting radionuclides are low-energy highly ionising radiation
emitters, i.e. β-, α, and Auger electron emitters. Cross section measurements to support the production of these novel therapeutic radionuclides are challenging and this emphasizes the need for providing good simulations and modeling of the associated nuclear reactions. The novel radionuclides are finding increasing applications also in theranostics, a precision-medicine technique implying the combination of a positron emitter and a therapeutic radionuclide of the same element. In the seminar, I describe recent advancement and problems in modeling the production cross sections of radionuclides of interest in nuclear medicine, also in view of the needs to support the INFN-LNL applied-research plans in radiopharmaceuticals production with the intermediate-energy SPES cyclotron.

 

 

Cagliari-2022.pdf