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Title

PLUTONIUM-239 SYSTEMIC BIOKINETIC MODEL FOR RATS

Organization

Department: Nuclear Eng'g & Health Physics

University: Idaho State University College: Science & Engineering Department: Nuclear Eng'g & Health Physics 23

Document Attachments

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Specimen Elements

City

Pocatello

Coverage

Unknown to Unknown

Creator

Robert T. Etnire

Publisher

Idaho State University

Type

Dissertation

Is Complete

No

Date Published

8/3/2020

Archive

digital

City: Pocatello

Degree

Doctorate

Document Attachments

Abstracts

The goal of this research project is to build a 239Pu systemic biokinetic model for rats. While a rat model has been developed by Durbin (1972), it is not widely used. New animal data and research available on the biokinetics of plutonium and other radionuclides provided the necessary information that allowed the update to the ICRP 67 human model to be revised. The ICRP 67 model will act as the starting point for this research. The data used for this project was collected from the experiment conducted at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute. A total of 48 rats were injected with 239Pu citrate and placed into one of six groups which correlated to a predefined time period of when the rat would be sacrificed for data collection. Urine and feces were collected daily from each rat. Organ and tissue samples were collected after each group of rats were sacrificed at the time of their previously assigned group. The modeling software used to build the rat model from the data collected during the experiment will be SAAM II. SAAM II is modeling and simulation software supporting statistical calibration of compartment models in various science disciplines with over 2,000 scientific publications. AIC is used as the statistical method to determine the quality of the compartment model. The ideal model is the one that minimizes the AIC value. The balance of determining the preferred model is one that introduces enough parameters for improving the goodness of fit without increasing complexities in order to produce a minimum AIC value. Multiple biokinetic models were built in SAAM II and processed to determine their fit and AIC was used to assess the quality of the model in the goal of building a systemic biokinetic model for rats. A reduced model does provide a better quality as defined by AIC, but there are still several compartments that do not have a good fit of the data. Not having as many complexities does seem to have better fits of each compartment. However, the reduced model does provide a starting point for future research in developing a 239Pu systemic biokinetic model for rats. Keywords: plutonium; biokinetics; rat model; injection; liver; skeleton