RE: False Positives in Personnel Dosimetry?

["Karam, Andrew" <Andrew_Karam@URMC.Rochester.edu>]

Dear Chris,

We badge about 1500 people at the University of Rochester.  Of those,
assuming nobody made any mistakes with control badges, we will have over
1200-1300 that show a dose of "M".  The only people that routinely show dose
are in Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, Radiation Oncology, and the Cardiac
Catheterization laboratory (where fluoroscopy is quite common - it really
helps to know where the catheter is.  So, in our case, when I see any dose
with the vast majority of our users, my first reaction is to think that
there was a problem with the control badge, the dosimeter was run through an
x-ray machine, or something else, other than a "real" exposure.

I recently went through 5 years of dose records for every badge series and,
during that time, this pattern holds.  For most of our badges most of the
time, dose is either "M" or is an obvious control badge problem.

Andy

Andrew Karam, University of Rochester
Andrew_Karam@URMC.Rochester.edu
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