A Realistic Anthropomorphic Phantom for Calculating Organ Doses Arising from External Photon Irradiation

Abstract

A voxel based male adult phantom, NORMAN, was used to determine effective doses and effective dose equivalent under various broad beam photon irradiation conditions for a range of energies from 10 keV to 10 MeV. The results were compared with those obtained using mathematical phantoms of the MIRD5 type. The degree of agreement was found to vary widely with energy and the irradiation geometry. At 10 keV the differences ranged from a few per cent to just over 100%, but the overall agreement improved with increasing energy, so that for energies of 100 keV or greater the differences were less than 20%. Giving NORMAN the same tissue composition as that of the MIRD5 phantoms produced only relatively small changes.