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Abstract. All nuclear medicine nurses need to have some knowledge and awareness on radiation safety. At present, there is no study to address this issue in Malaysia. The aims of this study were (1) to determine the level of knowledge and awareness on radiation safety among nuclear medicine nurses at Putrajaya Hospital in Malaysia and (2) to assess the effectiveness of a training program provided by the hospital to increase the knowledge and awareness of the nuclear medicine nurses. A total of 27 respondents attending a training program on radiation safety were asked to complete a questionnaire. The questionnaire consists 16 items and were categorized into two main areas, namely general radiation knowledge and radiation safety. Survey data were collected before and after the training and were analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired sample t-test. Respondents were scored out of a total of 16 marks with 8 marks for each area. The findings showed that the range of total scores obtained by the nuclear medicine nurses before and after the training were 6-14 (with a mean score of 11.19) and 13-16 marks (with a mean score of 14.85), respectively. Findings also revealed that the mean score for the area of general radiation knowledge (7.59) was higher than that of the radiation safety (7.26). Currently, the knowledge and awareness on radiation safety among the nuclear medicine nurses are at the moderate level. It is recommended that a national study be conducted to assess and increase the level of knowledge and awareness among all nuclear medicine nurses in Malaysia.

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With the introduction of the Computed Tomography (CT) into the SPECT technology, SPECT-CT is now capable to quantify the uptake to the organ by the introduction of Activity Calibration Factor (ACF). We implemented three different phantoms geometry to obtain the ACF. First acquisition done with uniform cylinder phantom from Data Spectrum, followed with uniform NEMA IEC Body and uniform glass bottle allows the simulation of different type of clinical imaging study. Acquisitions were performed on a Brightview XCT (Philip) gamma camera. All acquisition and reconstruction protocol according to the clinical practice setting with different voxel volume sizes of 0.811 cm3, 0.104 cm3 and 0.012 cm3 to demonstrate the different values of ACFs. The ACFs for Tc-99m, I-131 and Lu-177 calculated from 3D segmentation of SPECT-CT images for scaling three different matrix sizes. The results obtained in this study demonstrated that SPECT-CT is able to quantify uptake at the organ, and it has high possibility to be used as quantitative SPECT in clinical practice in the future.