Proton-produced radionuclides for radiodiagnostic modalities in cancer studies

With increasing rates of cancer cases globally, scientists and technologists have proposed cancer diagnosis using radioisotope-labelled chemical compounds. In this paper, using the TALYS 2017 codes we calculated excitation functions of several (p,n), (p,α), (p, 2n) and (p,3n) nuclear reactions. The TALYS-calculated results indicated that a few radionuclides such as ¹⁸F, ¹¹C, ⁶⁴Cu, ^I24I could be produced at relatively low threshold energies ranging from as low as 2.7 MeV to 4 MeV, whereas other radionuclides such as ¹²³I, ²⁰¹Tl, ¹¹¹In and ⁶⁷Ga could only be generated with protons of over 10 MeV. While ¹⁸F, ¹⁵O, ⁶⁴Cu and ¹²⁴I radionuclides could be produced via (p,n) nuclear reactions, other radionuclides including ^99mTc, ¹²³I, ¹¹¹In and ⁶⁷Ga could be produced through (p,2n) nuclear reactions . In addition, (p,α) nuclear reaction was found to suit ¹¹C and ¹³N radionuclide production, whereas (p,3n) fit ²⁰¹Tl production. In general, most radionuclides used for Single Photon Computed Tomography (SPECT) modality requires higher proton incident energies compared to those for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) modality in nuclear medicine.