Improving Reliability of Radiopharmaceuticals Synthesis System Used in Nuclear Medicine

The use of radioactive isotopes in nuclear medicine is crucial for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases, and the multi-purpose synthesis system plays a vital role in producing radiopharmaceuticals. However, due to the harsh radioactive operational conditions, the system must have high reliability to avoid failures that could have serious consequences. The purpose of the work presented in this paper is to develop a probabilistic assessment of system reliability using a mathematical modelling based on graph issued from Hasse diagrams and a reliability block diagram to compare the results. By dividing the synthesis system into small subsystems, the reliability of each subsystem and its possible architectures has been quantified. This approach allows identifying the components that have crucial impact on system reliability and clarifying their failure rates, taking into account operational conditions. The results show that it is possible to assess the reliability of a multi-purpose synthesis system used to produce radiopharmaceuticals for nuclear medicine using the proposed modelling and probabilistic assessment approach.

Keywords: System reliability assessment, Nuclear medicine, Hasse diagram, Reliability block diagram, Redundancy, Synthesis system, Radiation and reliability.

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