Development of polygonal-surface version of ICRP reference phantoms: lymphatic node modeling

Abstract

Among radiosensitive organs/tissues considered in ICRP Publication 103, lymphatic nodes are many small size tissues and widely distributed in the ICRP reference phantoms. It is difficult to directly convert lymphatic nodes of ICRP reference voxel phantoms to polygonal surfaces. Furthermore, in the ICRP reference phantoms lymphatic nodes were manually drawn only in six lymphatic node regions and the reference number of lymphatic nodes reported in ICRP Publication 89 was not considered. To address aforementioned limitations, the present study developed a new lymphatic node modeling method for the polygonal-surface version of ICRP reference phantoms. By using the developed method, lymphatic nodes were modelled in the preliminary version of ICRP male polygonal-surface phantom. Then, lymphatic node dose values were calculated and compared with those of the ICRP reference male voxel phantom to validate the developed modeling method. The present study developed the new lymphatic node modeling method and successfully modeled lymphatic nodes in the preliminary version of the ICRP male polygonal-surface phantom. From the results, it was demonstrated that the developed modeling method can be used to model lymphatic nodes in polygonal-surface version of ICRP reference phantoms