Part 3 Exam for Initial Certification

Nuclear Medical Physics (NMP) Oral Exam Content

Last verified on December 12, 2022
NMP Category Description
Radiation protection, safety, professionalism and ethics
  • Internal dosimetry, including MIRD (formalism), medical event assessment, fetal dose, units
  • Personnel safety, including facility surveys and occupational dose limits, radiation protection principles, personnel dosimetry, ALARA
  • Safety for the patient, family and public (including exposure pathways, breastfeeding, and pregnancy), shipping and waste disposal
  • Shielding, including facility design/layout and personnel protection
  • Professionalism and ethics
PET and hybrids
  • Radionuclide production and characteristics
  • QC procedures, including ACR/TJC/NEMA and acceptance testing, artifacts
  • System principles, image fusion,  random coincidences, scattered radiation, dead-time
  • Quantitative PET, including SUV
  • Image reconstruction, including attenuation correction, iterative reconstruction, filtered back projection
Single photon imaging systems including scintillation cameras, solid state cameras, and hybrids
  • Radionuclide production and characteristics for SPECT and planar imaging
  • QC procedures, including ACR/TJC/NEMA and acceptance testing, artifacts
  • System principles, including scintillation cameras, solid state cameras, collimators, image fusion, system characteristics
  • Dynamic imaging, renograms, cardiac function, ejection fraction, tracer kinetics, lung shunt fraction
  • Image reconstruction, including scanograms, attenuation correction, filters, edge enhancement, smoothing, unsharp masking, segmentation
Radiation measurements, including dose calibrators, well counters, survey meters, thyroid probes
  • Radioactivity measurement, including dose calibrators, well counters, thyroid uptake probe, survey meters
  • Statistics, minimum detectable activity
  • Radiation detectors, including survey meters, dead-time, personnel monitoring
  • Quantitative measurements, including calibration
  • QC procedures, including use of chi square, energy resolution, counting efficiency, geometry, linearity accuracy
Clinical procedures
  • Radionuclide therapy, including facilities, release criteria, radionuclide production
  • PET and hybrids
  • SPECT and hybrids, including gamma cameras
  • Radiation dosimetry, including risk, radiation protection, and CT dose
  • Radiopharmaceutical usage, thyroid imaging/uptake, informatics, display performance, miscellaneous