Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this review article is to collate the detailed insight of different dosimetry methodology and non-commercial /commercial dosimetry software tools, along with clinical study explored by specific authors, published in recent peer-review journals. The present work is segmented in three sections: i) Literature review of various dosimetry methodologies to evaluate absorbed dose in personalized radionuclide/ radiopharmaceutical therapy. ii) Technical as well as comparative information related to commercial dosimetry software tools used in radiopharmaceutical therapy (RPT). iii) Clinical review to compile the data of patient study for patient-specific dosimetry in internal radionuclide therapy.

Methods: Our study is based on latest available articles, to compile the information of upcoming dataset of newer methods to calculate absorbed dose, quantitative comparison of non-commercial / commercially available dosimetry software tools and recent study on patients who were clinically studied for targeted radionuclide therapy. To integrate the software based dosimetry tools in clinical routine; our department is planning to purchase few dosimetry software, henceforth a detailed survey is performed for recent articles published between 2018-2021 and other articles related to our work.

Results: The analysis of current review is categorized in three sections: i) Literature review for different calculation techniques for assessment of personalized internal radionuclide therapy, detail information of traditional and modern methods to calculate absorbed dose were gathered. With new updated dosimetry evaluation methods; more accurate, personalized and fast calculations are possible in clinical practice. ii) Technical review on different non-commercial / commercial software tools used in clinical routine, gives the first hand information of advantages and limitations of different software. The comparative study of different software is a step to achieve successes in performing the clinical practice for patient specific internal radionuclide therapy in our department. iii) Clinical review of the data, of patient study performed by various authors selected in our work gives the guideline to set the protocol to perform radionuclide therapy in clinical routine.

Conclusions: The objective of the present review is to compare the results generated by different non-commercial / commercial dosimetry software toolkits. The objectives of this work is not to provide the ranking or to recommend a given dosimetry methodology or software tools. However, encouraging results obtained in terms of absorbed doses were generally consistent between the different software toolkits. In absorbed dose calculations along with the harmonization process of different dosimetry methods and software tools, there are critical steps that should be deeply investigated on real cases based on voxel level or organ level calculations. The study provides the information of the most adequate computation technique and the methodology for the clinical or research application. Finally the outcome of the present study includes classification of various techniques mostly practiced in clinical routine, ranging from the less advance to personalized and the most accurate.

Keyword: Radiopharmaceutical Therapy (RPT), Personalized Radionuclide Therapy, Dosimetry software, Dosimetry methodology

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