The adult male voxel model ”Golem” segmented from whole-body CT patient data

Abstract 

This paper describes the construction of an adult male voxel model named ”Golem”¹(¹In Jewish tradition, Golem (Hebrew: shapeless matter) means an artificial human being endowed with life. There are several legends about successful creations of the Golem. The most popular one is probably the Golem of Prague, created (and destroyed) by Rabbi Yehuda Loev (1525–1609).) intended to be used for Monte Carlo simulations to calculate dosimetric quantities for radiation protection considerations. The model was segmented from whole-body medical image data of a living person who was 38 years old and had external dimensions close to those of the ICRP Reference Man. The segmentation process using dedicated image processing hard- and software is described and the resulting model is characterised with respect to weight and height of the total body, organ and tissue masses and red bone marrow distribution. A comparison with the respective data for ICRP Reference Man and three further voxel models is presented. Golem was found to agree reasonably well with Reference Man, so that he can be used for the assessment of ”representative” body doses.