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Monte Carlo and experimental internal radionuclide dosimetry in RANDO head phantom

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Abstract

Monte Carlo techniques are widely employed in internal dosimetry to obtain better estimates of absorbed dose distributions from irradiation sources in medicine. Accurate 3D absorbed dosimetry would be useful for risk assessment of inducing deterministic and stochastic biological effects for both therapeutic and diagnostic radiopharmaceuticals in nuclear medicine. The goal of this study was to experimentally evaluate the use of Geant4 application for tomographic emission (GATE) Monte Carlo package for 3D internal dosimetry using the head portion of the RANDO phantom. GATE package (version 6.1) was used to create a voxel model of a human head phantom from computed tomography (CT) images. Matrix dimensions consisted of 319 × 216 × 30 voxels (0.7871 × 0.7871 × 5 mm3). Measurements were made using thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLD-100). One rod-shaped source with 94 MBq activity of 99mTc was positioned in the brain tissue of the posterior part of the human head phantom in slice number 2. The results of the simulation were compared with measured mean absorbed dose per cumulative activity (S value). Absorbed dose was also calculated for each slice of the digital model of the head phantom and dose volume histograms (DVHs) were computed to analyze the absolute and relative doses in each slice from the simulation data. The S-values calculated by GATE and TLD methods showed a significant correlation (correlation coefficient, r 2 ≥ 0.99, p < 0.05) with each other. The maximum relative percentage differences were ≤14 % for most cases. DVHs demonstrated dose decrease along the direction of movement toward the lower slices of the head phantom. Based on the results obtained from GATE Monte Carlopackage it can be deduced that a complete dosimetry simulation study, from imaging to absorbed dose map calculation, is possible to execute in a single framework.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by Mashhad University of Medical Sciences with funding number of 920325. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Medical Physics Department, Faculty of Medicine, Mashhad University of Medical Science, Pardis -e- Daneshgah, Vakil Abad Blvd., Mashhad, Iran

    Ruhollah Ghahraman Asl, Shahrokh Nasseri & Mehdi Momennezhad

  2. Medical Physics Research Center, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran

    Shahrokh Nasseri

  3. Medical Physics Department, Faculty of Medicine, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran

    Ali Asghar Parach

  4. Nuclear Medicine Research Center, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran

    Seyed Rasoul Zakavi & Mehdi Momennezhad

  5. Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    David Davenport

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  1. Ruhollah Ghahraman Asl
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  2. Shahrokh Nasseri
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  3. Ali Asghar Parach
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  4. Seyed Rasoul Zakavi
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  5. Mehdi Momennezhad
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Correspondence to Ruhollah Ghahraman Asl or Mehdi Momennezhad.

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Ghahraman Asl, R., Nasseri, S., Parach, A.A. et al. Monte Carlo and experimental internal radionuclide dosimetry in RANDO head phantom. Australas Phys Eng Sci Med 38, 465–472 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-015-0367-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-015-0367-0

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