As it is known, the public health sector is strongly supported and addressed by all the member states of the European Union (EU). One of the very important aspects related to the public health that must be carefully addressed, is the one related to the exposure to ionizing radiation. Even that, in order to provide support in this matter for all the member states, EU issued the Council Directive 2013/59/Euratom (transposed nationally by Ministry Order 752/3978/136:2018), which lays down basic safety standards (BSS) for protection against the dangers arising from exposure to ionizing radiation, its practical implementation is a challenging task for all the EU member states.

In this project, we intend to focus specifically on a subject that still did not reach its maturity level, the one related to the exposure of the human eye to ionizing radiation fields. One of the most radiation-sensitive parts of the human eye is the eye lens, which starts to show degradations when being exposed to even lower dose levels that it was thought before (recent studies). As a consequence, the dose limitation for eye lens recommended by International Commission on Radiation Protection was set to a conservative safer value of 20 mSv/year (occupational exposure), which was lowered from the previous value of 150 mSv/year. For under 18 years old professionals, the new threshold was lowered from 50 mSv/year to 15 mSv/year. For general public exposure, the recommended value remains at 15 mSv/year.

In order to take the best possible radiation protection measures, precisely knowing the involved dose rates is a very important task that needs to be fulfilled. To develop proper metrological traceable methods for making these kinds of determinations, the involvement of the national metrology institutes is strongly required. The metrological method proposed in this project for addressing the dosimetry of the eye lens will have as main result obtaining the national metrological traceability chain.

Updated on September 2022

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1_1.1-TE-2019-0217, within PNCDI III

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