The purpose of the Life Sciences Working Group is to provide a forum for ICRM members to address radionuclide metrology issues as they relate to the life sciences. Issues may include, but are not limited to: development of methodologies to calibrate short-lived radionuclides of interest in nuclear medicine, measurement of decay properties (half-lives, decay energies and probabilities, etc.) of radionuclides used in nuclear medicine and biological research, and development of measurement methodologies for transferring National Measurement Standards to the clinic and research laboratory. The Working Group will facilitate finding solutions to these problems through workshops, publications, electronic communications (i.e., email), and collaborative work.

During 2008, a meeting of the Life Sciences Working Group (LSWG) was held at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington 12-13 November 2008, immediately following the meeting of the Liquid Scintillation Counting Working Group. The meeting was attended by 9 participants from 5 institutions. The format consisted of a number of presentations from each laboratory, followed by a discussion period. The topics covered during the meeting included:

• Quality Assurance, Standards, and Metrology
• Inter-laboratory comparisons
• Recent standardizations and measurements of radionuclides used in radiation medicine
• Radionuclide calibrators; and
• Developing, funding, and communicating the importance of metrology programs in the Life Sciences

• Collecting activity calibrator factors for medical radionuclides in different ionization chambers. (Status: An extensive reference list has been collected. Factors are being summarized to be posted on the Life Sciences web page.)

• Expand the information available on the working group web page
• Recommend that laboratories with stability data on their ionization chambers actively measure half lives
• Publish a review of the determination of calibration figures for radionuclide calibrators

A CD of the presentations, along with those from the Liquid Scintillation Counting Working Group meeting, is being prepared and will be made available from the ICRM Secretary. It is also planned to post the presentations of the LSWG web site.

Following the meeting in Bratislava, the next interim meeting of the LSWG is being planned for mid-2010 to take place at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig.