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.