Risk Assessment and Approaches to Addressing Human Error in Medical Uses of Radioisotopes

Records maintained by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) indicate that human error is a primary or contributing factor to misadministration of prescribed doses of radiation during medical treatment. Such misadministrations, whether by machine or human error can have adverse consequences. Hence, the NRC undertook human factors analyses of the teletherapy and the remote afterloading brachytherapy systems and a risk assessment of the use of the gamma knife to determine the root causes of human errors and their potential risks.