International Conference on Individual Monitoring of Ionising Radiation.

This special issue of the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry is dedicated to the Proceedings of the International Conference on Individual Monitoring of Ionising Radiation (IM2015) held in Bruges, Belgium, from 20 to 24 April 2015. IM2015 was the fifth of a series of conferences dealing with individual monitoring. This conference series is initiated by EURADOS, the European Radiation Dosimetry Group, and is organised every 5 years. In 2015, the conference was jointly organised by the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK•CEN), AV Controlatom, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. It brought together scientists from regulatory authorities, individual monitoring services (IMS), research bodies, European networks and companies, for the purpose of facilitating the dissemination of knowledge, exchanging experiences and promoting new ideas in the field of individual monitoring. The origin of this series of conferences lies in Europe. Although there has always been a significant contribution from other continents, IM2015 was intended to have an even more worldwide character. Several experts from different countries were included in the scientific committee, and the conference was advertised worldwide. It turned out as a success as ~20% of the participants were from outside Europe. The scientific programme was structured in nine sessions, focussing on individual monitoring of workers, be it in medicine, research or industry (nuclear, aircrew, space, NORM and other). Contributions on monitoring of the public exposures were also accepted. Three mornings started with a refresher course, each of them fully booked. The basics of uncertainty assessments in external and internal dosimetry were refreshed by J.W. van Dijk and T. Vrba. The third refresher course was on computational methods in external dosimetry by J.M. Gomez-Ros. The presentations were given in a plenary session with high attendance. In total, nine invited lectures were given and 69 oral presentations were selected by the scientific committee from the submitted contributions. The interaction with the participants was stimulated in two discussion sessions on ‘hot’ topics: ‘eye lens dosimetry’ and ‘the sense or non-sense of accreditation in dosimetry’. A total of 161 posters were presented in three poster sessions. Parallel to the conference, the participants meeting of the Eurados IC2014 intercomparison on external dosimetry was hosted in Bruges, and a separate course on occupational radiation dosimetry was organised. This course was aimed for occupational physicians, going less into the technical details, but focussing more on practical situations. Of note, 295 participants and 36 exhibitors followed the scientific and social part of the conference. Fifty-three persons joined separately for the special course on occupational radiation dosimetry. After each session, the chair persons provided a short summary on the most important conclusions. These are bundled in a concluding overview of the conference, and a summary is given below. International and European standards and recommendations are widely used in the dosimetry community. An overview of all the applicable ISO and IEC standards was given. Also European initiatives as the RP160 recommendations, the TECHREC project and the IDEAS guidelines are widely used. There was a lot of interest and attention given to the new operational quantities for external exposure that are being proposed by the ICRU. There is a high demand for intercomparison exercises: most of the IMS participate in these exercises (provided mostly by EURADOS) and the number of participants is increasing. The analysis of the results indicates that most IMS perform adequately but there is room for improvement. The EURADOS survey on Quality Assurance in dosimetry demonstrated that all IMS are very much aware that QA is a very important element. Almost all of them are in some way