Calculating patient-specific organ doses from adult body CT scans by Monte Carlo analysis using male-individual voxel phantoms.

Computed tomography (CT) dose calculators such as the WAZA-ARI are useful for estimating the radiation dose from CT examination. This study determined correction coefficients for estimating organ doses to patients of any size attended to in daily clinical practice. To this end, the authors constructed voxel phantoms based on the CT images of patients of different size and simulated radiation transport in CT examinations to obtain organ doses using Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that the linear relationship between effective diameter and organ dose can predict patient-specific organ doses. The effective diameter-based prediction can provide accuracy within an error of ±10%, whereas an error of >20% was observed only in the liver and bladder. These results may contribute to practical irradiation dose calculation from a CT examination depending on individual patient size within a certain degree of accuracy.