Adult mathematical phantoms for calculation of dose from ionizing radiation
Publish date: 2015-09-15
Report number: FOI-R--4099--SE
Pages: 30
Written in: English
Keywords:
- Computational phantoms
- Mathematical phantoms
- Radiation Dosimetry
- MCNP
- MIRD
Abstract
The radiation dose is considered to be the physical quantity that is most closely related to the risk resulting from the exposure to ionizing radiation. Thus, health effects due to the exposure requires that the radiation dose to individuals is determined. For complex radiation geometries and irradiated bodies, assessment of the radiation dose received by exposed individuals can be extremely challenging, time consuming or even practically impossible by means of analytical methods and practical experiments. Computational human phantoms with mathematical representations of the human body have been used for addressing demanding dosimetry issues since the 1950s. Later developments have led to stylized anthropomorphic phantoms with detailed mathematical descriptions of body regions and organs resembling human anatomy and with differentiated tissue compositions. As part of a development regarding its virtual laboratory, the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) seeks to introduce a male and a female mathematical phantom serving as standards for dose calculations. In this report, a commercially available software has been used in order to generate MIRD-5 type stylized male and female computational phantoms in MCNP code. Since the produced MCNP input files do not provide all the necessary volumes needed for dosimetry purposes, a stochastic volume determination method in MCNP is utilized in order to calculate the missing volumes. For most of the organs and body regions, the calculated data deviates with less than 10% from the volumes provided in the input file produced by the code generating software and the data found in the literature for similar models. There are a few larger discrepancies concerning the volumes of male genitalia region, male and female facial skeleton, leg skin and thyroid that need to be further addressed. The stochastic error in the F6-tally results from MCNP simulations for SVD is about 1% for 1E+10 starting monoenergetic photons with 141 keV. It is concluded that the generated male and female models, MCAP (Male Computational Anthropomorphic Phantom) and FCAP (Female Computational Anthropomorphic Phantom), can be used as FOI laboratory standards with the volumes provided in the produced MCNP input file. For body parts where there are no volumes provided in the input file, volumes calculated through stochastic volume determination can be used. The issues regarding deviating volumes need to be further addressed and necessary adjustments should be made in later versions of the phantoms.