OEDIPE: Software for Fast Construction of Computational Phantoms and MCNPX Calculation in Internal Dosimetry

Evaluation of absorbed and effective doses to patients from radiopharmaceuticals using the ICRP 110 reference computational phantoms and ICRP 103 formulation

In diagnostic nuclear medicine, mean absorbed doses to patients' organs and effective doses are published for standard stylised anatomic models. To provide more realistic and detailed geometries of the human morphology, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) has recently adopted male and female voxel phantoms to represent the reference adult. This work investigates the impact of the use of these new computational phantoms. The absorbed doses were calculated for 11 different radiopharmaceuticals currently used in diagnostic nuclear medicine. They were calculated for the ICRP 110 reference computational phantoms using the OEDIPE software and the MCNP extended Monte Carlo code. The biokinetic models were issued from ICRP Publications 53, 80 and 106. The results were then compared with published values given in these ICRP Publications. To discriminate the effect of anatomical differences on organ doses from the effect of the calculation method, the Monte Carlo calculations were repeated for the reference adult stylised phantom. The voxel effect, the influence of the use of different densities and nuclear decay data were also investigated. Effective doses were determined for the ICRP 110 adult reference computational phantom with the tissue weighting factor of ICRP Publication 60 and the tissue weighting factors of ICRP Publication 103. The calculation method and, in particular, the simulation of the electron transport have a significant influence on the calculated doses, especially, for small and walled organs. Overestimates of >200 % were observed for the urinary bladder wall of the stylised phantom compared with the computational phantoms. The unrealistic organ topology of the stylised phantom leads to important dose differences, sometimes by an order of magnitude. The effective doses calculated using the new computational phantoms and the new tissue weighting factors are globally lower than the published ones, except for some radiopharmaceuticals, where the differences can reach 60 % higher than the published values. This study analyses the first set of absorbed and effective doses with the new ICRP male and female reference computational phantoms for different radiopharmaceuticals. It highlights the importance of taking into account the electron transport and the realism of the shape and inter-organ distances of the anthropomorphic model used.

Creation of ORNL NURBS-based phantoms: evaluation of the voxel effect on absorbed doses from radiopharmaceuticals

Doses from radiopharmaceuticals absorbed by organs can be assessed using Monte Carlo simulations and computational phantoms. Patient-based voxel phantoms improve the realism of organ topology but present unrealistic stair-stepped surfaces. The goal of this research was to study the voxel effect on the basis of creation and voxelisation of a series of non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) reference phantoms issued from the publication of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Absorbed doses from various radiopharmaceuticals were calculated and compared with the values obtained for the corresponding analytical phantoms for models of an adult male and a 5-y-old child. Dose differences lower than 12.5 % were observed when the critical structure of the skin was excluded. Moreover, the highest differences were noted for small organs and walls. Finally, all NURBS phantoms of the ORNL series, their voxelised version and the corresponding Monte Carlo N-Particle eXtended input files were programmed and are available for further simulations.