Studies of tantalum dust labelled with 182Ta in dogs following either inhalation or insufflation exposures demonstrated that (a) the “alveolarization” of tantalum dust leads to prolonged retention, viz., a mean biological removal half-time greater than two years; (b) mucociliary transport, the dominant clearance mechanism, was somewhat longer than that reported for other "insoluble" dusts and apparently independent of the absolute amount of tantalum present; (c) the minimal surface density suitable for clinical bronchography is of the order of 10 mg tantalum/cm2 of bronchial surface; and (d) radiographic assessments of either airways or alveolar areas cannot utilize a surface deposition of ≤mg/cm2 tantalum and therefore are of limited value in quantitative applications, e.g., absolute tantalum retention.
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Bianco et al. (1974) studied this question.