RENEB/EURADOS field exercise 2019: robust dose estimation under outdoor conditions based on the dicentric chromosome assay

Purpose Biological and/or physical assays for retrospective dosimetry are valuable tools to recover the exposure situation and to aid medical decision making. To further validate and improve such biological and physical assays, in 2019, EURADOS Working Group 10 and RENEB performed a field exercise in Lund, Sweden, to simulate various real-life exposure scenarios. Materials and methods For the dicentric chromosome assay (DCA), blood tubes were located at anthropomorphic phantoms positioned in different geometries and were irradiated with a 1.36 TBq Ir-192-source. For each exposure condition, dose estimates were provided by at least one laboratory and for four conditions by 17 participating RENEB laboratories. Three radio-photoluminescence glass dosimeters were placed at each tube to assess reference doses. Results The DCA results were homogeneous between participants and matched well with the reference doses (>= 95% of estimates within +/- 0.5 Gy of the reference). For samples close to the source systematic underestimation could be corrected by accounting for exposure time. Heterogeneity within and between tubes was detected for reference doses as well as for DCA doses estimates. Conclusions The participants were able to successfully estimate the doses and to provide important information on the exposure scenarios under conditions closely resembling a real-life situation.