ИСТИНА

Currently the importance and scope of radionuclide diagnostics procedures increases which leads to a higher demand in medical radionuclides production. The main diagnostics radionuclide for radiopharmaceutical production is 99mTc due to a mild monoenergetic gamma radiation (140 keV) and a short half-life period (6 h) which allows to perform diagnostics with a lower patient radiation dose. That is why exploration of different accelerator techniques to produce aimed radionuclide appears to be perspective. 99mTc is usually obtained from the decay of 99Mo which is first produced at a nuclear facility and then used for the production of isotopic generator 99Mo/99mTc. Photonuclear reaction 100Mo(γ,n)99Mo as well as production of 99Mo/99mTc generator was earlier investigated by our co-author A. V. Sabelnikov [1]. This method provides carrier free 99mTc with activities high enough for large scale production and is preferable with respect to the chemical purity of the radionuclide of interest. The important task of our experiment was to demonstrate potential of a position sensitive semiconductor pixel detector Timepix with a sensor of 2 mm CdTe for conducting SPECT imaging as a new approach for better resolved diagnostics [2]. For this goal we implemented 99mTc produced by irradiation of enriched 100Mo at the electron accelerator MT-25 in FLNR JINR. The powder of 100MoO3 was irradiated for 6 days at 10.5 mkA current by 23 MeV bremsstrahlung. After the irradiation we dissolved 100MoO3 in 2 M NaOH and used this solution to make an isotope generator of 99mTc. Isotope generator was prepared using a known technique [3] that we optimised to better suit the conditions of our experiment. Based on the activity of molybdenum solution after the irradiation we calculated the yield of 99Mo to be 583 Bq/(mkA·mg·h). 99mTc was later used to prepare samples to test the Timepix detector. The results will be shown at the conference.