Tetrahedral-mesh-based computational human phantom for fast Monte Carlo dose calculations

Abstract

Although polygonal-surface computational human phantoms can address several critical limitations of conventional voxel phantoms, their Monte Carlo simulation speeds are much slower than those of voxel phantoms. In this study, we sought to overcome this problem by developing a new type of computational human phantom, a tetrahedral mesh phantom, by converting a polygonal surface phantom to a tetrahedral mesh geometry. The constructed phantom was implemented in the Geant4 Monte Carlo code to calculate organ doses as well as to measure computation speed, the values were then compared with those for the original polygonal surface phantom. It was found that using the tetrahedral mesh phantom significantly improved the computation speed by factors of between 150 and 832 considering all of the particles and simulated energies other than the low-energy neutrons (0.01 and 1 MeV), for which the improvement was less significant (17.2 and 8.8 times, respectively).