Estimating internal dose coefficients of short-lived radionuclides in accordance with ICRP 2007 recommendations

ORGAN ABSORBED DOSE ESTIMATION REFLECTING SPECIFIC ORGAN MASSES WITH SIMPLE SCALING OF REFERENCE DOSES USING THE ORGAN MASSES

Estimating organ absorbed doses in consideration of person-specific parameters is important for radiation protection in diagnostic nuclear medicine. This study proposes a straightforward method for estimating the organ dose that reflects a specific organ mass by scaling the reference organ dose using the inverse ratio of the specific organ mass to the reference organ mass. For the administration of radiopharmaceuticals labelled by 99mTc or 123I, the organ doses for the liver, spleen, red marrow and thyroid obtained by the method were compared with those generated by a Monte Carlo simulation. The discrepancies were less than 14% for the liver, spleen and thyroid. Conversely, in some cases, the red marrow discrepancies were greater than 30% due to the wide distribution of red marrow in the trunk and head regions. This study confirms that the method of scaling organ doses can be effective for estimating mass-specific doses for solid organs.