This paper presents a design and work optimization procedure to reduce personnel exposure in PET uptake rooms. Optimization of Radiation Doses Received by Personnel in PET Uptake Rooms Maria E. Perez, José M. Verde, Carlos Montes, Julio A. Ramos, Sofía García, and Jorge Hernandez* Abstract: Reduction of dose to exposed per- sonnel during positron emission tomography (PET) installation usually relies on physical shielding. While the major contribution of shielding is unquestioned, it is usually the only method applied. Other methods of reduc- tion, such as working procedure optimization, the position of the furniture, and rooms are usually disregarded in these installations. This paper presents a design and work optimization procedure used in a particular institution. The influence on the dose received by personnel due to the positioning of injection chairs, injection room configuration, and working procedures is studied. Using this optimization strategy, it is possible to reduce the technician dose due to patients by a factor of 0.59. Injection room de- sign is much more important for optimizing the received dose than is work-flow manage- ment. The influence of the order of patient en- trance on received dose was the aspect that produced the smallest variation in received doses. It is recommended that the optimization be carried out for the installation proposed in the design phase, when no additional cost is required, because the position of the doors of the injection rooms depends on the where the injection chairs are situated. Health Phys. 107 (Supplement 3):S198–S201; 2014 Key words: operational topics; exposure, occu- pational; occupational safety; positron emission tomography INTRODUCTION Patients undergoing FDG-PET investigations must be kept in a quiescent state after the adminis- tration of the radiopharmaceuti- cal (Peet et al. 2012). Radiation due to the proximity of these patients could suppose an unac- ceptably high dose not only for members of the public, but also for personnel exposed at the instal- lation. To avoid this, it is widely ac- cepted that specific preparation rooms with appropriate shielding during this uptake phase is required (Madsen et al. 2006). For a number of reasons, shielding requirements for these injection rooms may be more stringent than those for exam- ination rooms. Because preparation rooms are usually much smaller than exploration rooms, the pa- tient will tend to be much closer to the personnel in such a space. Furthermore, the activity in the pa- tient’s body is much lower when the examination is in progress since the nuclei have undergone a 1-h decay and a substantial frac- tion of the radionuclei will have been excreted before the examina- tion (Jones et al. 1982). In every practice, professional exposure can be reduced in two ways: by using appropriate struc- tural shielding and by optimizing working procedures. The former has been studied extensively (Coker 2003; Cruzate and Discacciatti, 2008), while the latter is usually consid- ered in medical, non-surgical im- age procedures. Adequate analysis and optimization of these proce- dures will enable the exposure of staff to be reduced or at least maintained at acceptable values when less conservative shielding is employed. This study analyses the contribu- tion of injected patients waiting in injection rooms to the dose re- ceived by personnel in charge of administering radiopharmaceuti- cals, and the optimization of the set-up of injection rooms to reduce this exposure. MATERIALS AND METHODS This institution has a 4.8‐m-wide space in which three injection rooms are to be built. One of them needs to be wider than the other two for use with bed-ridden pa- tients and will be located next to the patients’ entrance or between the other two rooms to allow for the entrance of beds. This larger room will be 1.64 m wide while the other two will have a width of *University Hospital of Salamanca, Medical Phys- ics Department, Paseo de San Vicente, 58‐182, Salamanca, Spain. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. María Esperanza Pérez Álvarez received her degree in physics from the University of Salmanca (Spain) in 2010. In 2011, she began her professional career in medical physics at the University Hospital in Salamanca (Spain). Nowadays she is working at the general university hospital of Ciudad Real. Her email address is mariasprnz@hotmail.com. Operational Topic S198 www.health-physics.com November 2014 Copyright © 2014 Health Physics Society. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.