Interpretation of Urinary Excretion Data From Plutonium Wound Cases Treated With DTPA: Application of Different...

After a chelation treatment, assessment of intake and doses is the primary concern of an internal dosimetrist. Using the urinary excretion data from two actual wound cases encountered at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), this paper discusses several methods that can be used to interpret intakes from the urinary data collected after one or multiple chelation treatments. One of the methods uses only the data assumed to be unaffected by chelation (data collected beyond 100 d after the last treatment). This method, used by many facilities for official dose records, was implemented by employing maximum likelihood analysis and Bayesian analysis methods. The impacts of an improper assumption about the physicochemical behavior of a radioactive material and the importance of the use of a facility-specific biokinetic model when available have also been demonstrated. Another method analyzed both the affected and unaffected urinary data using an empirical urinary excretion model. This method, although case-specific, was useful in determining the actual intakes and the doses averted or the reduction in body burdens due to chelation treatments. This approach was important in determining the enhancement factors, the behavior of the chelate, and other observations that may be pertinent to several DTPA compartmental modeling approaches being conducted by the health physics community.