ABR-NMP-P2 Exam Domains 2026: Complete Guide to All 5 Content Areas

How the Content Guide Is Organized

The American Board of Radiology publishes a single Content Guide for the Nuclear Medical Physics Part 2 Qualifying Examination, and that guide is the only authoritative map of what can appear on test day. It lists five domain headings in a fixed order, and the version reviewed for this article retains that source order because it reflects how the ABR itself groups the material - not an editorial ranking of importance. There are no published percentage weights attached to any domain, so candidates should resist the temptation to guess at a "big domain" and a "small domain." Treat all five as fully testable.

This guide walks through each domain using the ABR's own content-mapping language, then connects that content to the exam's actual format: a remotely proctored, closed-book, single-session computer exam administered through myABR. For a broader pass strategy that ties these domains to a week-by-week plan, see the ABR-NMP-P2 Study Guide 2026, and for a condensed reference once you've studied each domain, the ABR-NMP-P2 Cheat Sheet 2026 is built around these same five headings.

Domain 1: Radiation Protection, Safety, Professionalism and Ethics

This domain covers the regulatory and dosimetric backbone of nuclear medicine physics practice. The ABR's content mapping places internal dosimetry, fetal dosimetry, and CT dosimetry alongside occupational and public safety, shielding design, and professional ethics - a combination that tests both calculation skill and judgment.

Because this domain blends calculation-based items with scenario-based professionalism questions, it rewards candidates who practice both number-crunching and reading comprehension under time pressure - a distinction worth building into your review sessions.

Domain 2: PET & Hybrid

Domain 2 is dedicated to positron emission tomography and the hybrid systems built around it. The content guide's mapping is detailed here, spanning detector physics through acceptance testing, which suggests candidates should expect both conceptual and applied questions.

This is one of the more instrumentation-heavy domains, and because it pairs naturally with Domain 3's imaging-systems content, many candidates study them in the same block. If you're unsure how demanding this pairing feels in practice, the How Hard Is the ABR-NMP-P2 Exam? guide breaks down where candidates typically report the most friction.

Domain 3: Single Photon Imaging Systems

Domain 3 covers scintillation cameras, solid-state cameras, and hybrid single-photon systems. This is the domain most likely to include image-location item types, since the ABR's preparation materials describe Drag and Drop questions involving an anatomical site, an equipment component, or a graph region - and single-photon hardware diagrams are a natural fit for that format.

Domain 4: Radiation Measurements

Domain 4 is the most explicitly hardware-named domain in the entire content guide: dose calibrators, well counters, survey meters, and thyroid probes. It is also the most statistically dense domain, since the mapped content pulls in counting statistics and error analysis alongside instrument-specific calibration topics.

Because this domain leans heavily on calculation, it is a good place to lean on the ABR's own constants and physical values resource during study - not to memorize numbers you'll never need, but to become fluent in how that reference is organized, since it will not necessarily contain every value a question requires.

Domain 5: Clinical Procedures

The final domain shifts from physics and instrumentation to clinical application. It covers a wide span of organ systems and procedure types, which makes it the broadest domain in terms of raw topic count even though it carries no stated weight advantage over the others.

Domain 5 is a good stress-test of whether your understanding of the first four domains is actually integrated or just memorized in isolation - a clinical procedure question can quietly require a dosimetry calculation from Domain 1 or a statistics concept from Domain 4.

Exam Format and Question Style

All five domains are tested inside a single remotely proctored session administered through myABR. According to the 2026 remote exam guide, the Nuclear Part 2 exam includes 130 questions with 4 hours 1 minute of answering time, plus a 20-minute tutorial/practice period and a 25-minute break allowance, for a total allotted time of 4 hours 46 minutes.

Most questions are multiple-choice, but ABR preparation materials also describe Drag and Drop items that require locating an anatomical site, an equipment component, or a region on a graph. The exam is closed-book: no scratch paper or study notes are permitted, though a compliant physical erasable whiteboard is allowed and must be wiped clean at both the start and end of the session. An embedded calculator or an ABR-approved handheld calculator is permitted for the numerical work embedded in Domains 1, 2, and 4 especially.

One operational detail candidates frequently overlook: starting a break locks your responses to previously viewed questions, including unanswered or flagged ones, and using more than your allotted break time reduces your answering time. Plan your pacing across all five domains with that rule in mind rather than treating breaks as free time.

Mapping the Five Domains to a Study Calendar

Since there is no official weighting, a defensible approach is to allocate roughly even study time to each domain, then add extra review time to whichever domain your practice performance shows as weakest. A simple structure looks like this:

This is a scheduling framework, not a mandated method - swap in whatever spaced-review or active-recall habits already work for you, but anchor them to these five domain names so your review stays aligned with the actual content guide. For a more detailed week-by-week breakdown and pacing benchmarks, see the full ABR-NMP-P2 Study Guide 2026.

Who Actually Tests on These Domains

Part 2 sits in the middle of the ABR's medical physics certification pathway. Standard eligibility requires having passed both the General and Clinical sections of Part 1 and completing, or being on track to complete, a CAMPEP-accredited residency or Doctor of Medical Physics program by August 31 of the exam year, with residency started within ten years of passing Part 1. Passing Part 2 alone does not confer board certification - the full initial-certification pathway requires Parts 1, 2, and 3. If you want the complete eligibility breakdown, including the additional-specialty pathway for already-certified physicists, review ABR-NMP-P2 Requirements 2026.

The five domains covered here directly reflect the day-to-day responsibilities of a clinical nuclear medicine physicist: shielding and safety programs (Domain 1), PET/CT support (Domain 2), gamma camera and SPECT/CT oversight (Domain 3), calibration and counting-lab work (Domain 4), and clinical procedure consultation (Domain 5). Employers hiring for these roles - hospital imaging departments, academic medical centers, and radiopharmacy-adjacent practices - expect candidates on this track to be fluent in exactly this content. For a look at how this credential connects to job listings and career paths, see ABR-NMP-P2 Jobs.

Once you've mapped your own strengths against these five domains, you can gauge readiness more precisely with full-length timed practice on the main practice test platform, which is built around this same domain structure rather than a generic physics question bank.

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