Nuclear medicine is a well-established and valuable clinical diagnostic tool in several areas of medicine including urology, neurology, orthopedics, and oncology (1). While the radiation exposure from nuclear medicine studies is on par, and often even lower, than that of other medical imaging procedures it is still prudent to limit the amount of radiation exposure from nuclear medicine imaging procedures to the lowest amount possible without reducing diagnostic capability. This is particularly relevant in children, as their developing tissues may be more sensitive to the...

The Working Group developed the development of the North American Consensus Guidelines for Administered Radiopharmaceutical Activities in Children and Adolescents published in 2011 (5). These guidelines provided standard administered activities for 11 radiopharmaceuticals commonly used in children. The “Go with the Guidelines” campaign (Figure 2) sponsored by the Image Gently Alliance and the SNMMI sought to deliver a copy of the Guidelines poster to every nuclear medicine clinic in North America. A follow-up survey of the original North American pediatric hospitals performed in 2013 reveled...

Over the past ten years, the Nuclear Medicine Working Group has helped to standardize the radiopharmaceutical administered activities in the practice of pediatric nuclear medicine across North American and to harmonize these practices with those in Europe. An evaluation by the Nuclear Medicine Global Initiative indicated that those regions that have adopted guidelines for pediatric nuclear medicine, in general, have less variability in the practice and lower patient radiation dose than those that have not (10,11). Some workers have found that the concept of minimum...

Donald P. Frush, MD FAAP FACR Chair, Image Gently® Alliance Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford Stanford University School of Medicine 725 Welch Road Main – Room G343 Stanford, CA 94304 [email protected] (650) 725-6070 / (650) 721-3310 (650) 498-1861 (Direct)

Treves ST. Pediatric nuclear medicine and molecular imaging. Fourth edition. ed. New York: Springer; 2014. Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII Phase II: National Academic Press; 2006. Fahey FH, Treves ST, Adelstein SJ. Minimizing and Communicating Risk in Pediatric Nuclear Medicine. J Nucl Med. 2011;52:1240-1251. Treves ST, Davis RT, Fahey FH. Administered Radiopharmaceutical Doses in Children: A Survey of 13 Pediatric Hospitals in North America. J Nucl Med 2008; 49(6):1024-1027. Gelfand MJ, Parisi MT, Treves ST. Pediatric radiopharmaceutical administered...