Dose management in conventional nuclear medicine imaging and PET

This review of the basic concepts of dose management in conventional nuclear medicine imaging and positron emission tomography focuses on methods for dose assessment, difficulties with image quality evaluation, need for clear image quality criteria and observer performance studies, studies on representative groups of patients contra individual patients, clinically applicable methods for dose reduction, including the use of diagnostic reference levels. The dose management in nuclear imaging requires more attention and there is a need for better contribution of new technology for individual patient dose management as well as for education and training of the multidisciplinary teams of nuclear medicine physicians, technologists and medical physicists, responsible for the investigations.