Construction of a high-definition ‘Reference Korean’ voxel phantom for organ and tissue radiation dose calculation

Abstract

The voxel phantoms, which are used to calculate the radiation dose distribution in a human body, are usually constructed using the CT or MR images. The CT and MR images are, however, gray images and the organs and tissue are not very clearly identified in the images, making it very difficult to construct an accurate model of a human body. In this study, we developed a very accurately defined voxel phantom (HDRK-Man) to represents the male radiation workers in Korea by adjusting the voxel phantom to the ‘Reference Korean’ data. HDRK-Man is 171 cm and 67.8 kg and has the organs and tissue of the Korean reference size. The current version of the voxel phantom is made of 29,602,950 voxels and the size of each voxel is 1.981 mm×1.981 mm×2.085 mm. The developed voxel phantom was implemented in a Monte Carlo radiation transport code, MCNPX, and the radiation dose to various organs and tissue in a human body was calculated for several irradiation geometries (AP, LLAT, PA) and photon energies (0.015 to 10 MeV).