Concerted Uranium Research in Europe (CURE): toward a collaborative project integrating dosimetry, epidemiology and radiobiology to study the effects of occupational uranium exposure.

The potential health impacts of chronic exposures to uranium, as they occur in occupational settings, are not well characterized. Most epidemiological studies have been limited by small sample sizes, and a lack of harmonization of methods used to quantify radiation doses resulting from uranium exposure. Experimental studies have shown that uranium has biological effects, but their implications for human health are not clear. New studies that would combine the strengths of large, well-designed epidemiological datasets with those of state-of-the-art biological methods would help improve the characterization of the biological and health effects of occupational uranium exposure. The aim of the European Commission concerted action CURE (Concerted Uranium Research in Europe) was to develop protocols for such a future collaborative research project, in which dosimetry, epidemiology and biology would be integrated to better characterize the effects of occupational uranium exposure. These protocols were developed from existing European cohorts of workers exposed to uranium together with expertise in epidemiology, biology and dosimetry of CURE partner institutions. The preparatory work of CURE should allow a large scale collaborative project to be launched, in order to better characterize the effects of uranium exposure and more generally of alpha particles and low doses of ionizing radiation.

CREATION OF FEMALE COMPUTATIONAL PHANTOMS FOR CALIBRATION OF LUNG COUNTERS.

Plutonium isotopes are of high concern because they lead to high doses. In case of contamination, the activity burden inside the lungs should be assessed accurately. Many studies showed that the presence of breasts has a substantial influence on lung counting efficiencies. Currently, the calibration of most lung counting systems is done by means of physical phantoms representing only male chests. A set of female computational phantoms has been developed in order to provide gender-specific efficiency calibrations for the (241)Am gamma emission (59.54 keV). The phantoms were created starting from a library of female chest phantoms provided by Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN) (Farah, J. Amélioration des mesures anthroporadiamétriques personnalisées assistées par calcul Monte Carlo: optimisation des temps de calculs et méthodologie de mesure pour l'établissement de la répartition d'activite. PhD Thesis, 2011). While the IRSN phantoms represent a supine measurement position, the SCK•CEN lung counter set-up requires the persons to be sitting in a chair. Using open-source software, the breast shapes of the original phantoms have been recreated to simulate the drooping of breasts in vertical sitting position. A Monte Carlo approach was chosen for calculating calibration coefficients for female lung counting. The results obtained with MCNPx 2.7 simulations showed a significant decrease in the detection efficiency. For bigger bust and breast sizes, the detection efficiency showed to be up to 10 times lower than the ones measured with the Livermore male torso phantom.