A portable survey meter method for locating and quantifying removable contamination after 131I therapies.

Identifying 131I surface contamination and decontaminating the removable fraction from rooms where patients have received iodine therapies is a common task at many hospitals. The current regulatory preferred method for this task is wipe testing for removable contamination. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the suitability of a sensitive survey meter for this task. Both methods and their detection systems are evaluated in the laboratory as well as in a clinical environment. The results indicate that the portable survey meter method is better at both locating and quantifying removable contamination. An additional benefit of the survey meter method is the ability to clean rooms promptly for reoccupancy.