Recent Nuclear Data Measurements Relevant to the Cyclotron Production of Some Medically Important Short-Lived Radiohalogens

Abstract

Besides organic elements (C, H, N, O, P etc.) members of the family of halogens (F, CI, Br, I etc.) form strong covalent bonds with C. Some of the short-lived neutron deficient radioisotopes of those elements are therefore very useful for labelling biomolecules or their analogues which eventually find applications in regional functional studies in-vivo using either single photon emission computed tomography (e.g. ¹²³I) or positron emission computed tomography (e.g. ¹⁸F and ⁷⁵Br). We recently performed nuclear data measurements in the following cases: i) ³He- and d-induced reactions on ²⁰Ne with a view to determining the contribution of the $^{18}Ne\,{\xrightarrow[{1.67\,\sec }]{}^{18}}F$ precursor process to the total ¹⁸F formation ii) (³He,xn)- and (α, xn)-react ions on arsenic as well as (d, xn)-react ions on natural bromine up to 90 MeV with the aim of determining the optimum conditions for the production of positron emitter ⁷⁵Br iii) (d,xn)-reactions on enriched ¹²²Te up to incident deuteron energy of 40 MeV with the objective of investigating the (d, n)-reaction as a potential route for ¹²³I production.

Some considerations relevant to the large scale production of radioisotopes are discussed.