ERSN Laboratory, Physics Department, Faculty of Sciences, University Abdelmalek Essaadi, Tetouan, Morocco.
Nuclear Medicine Department, Military Hospital Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco.
Radiol Phys Technol. 2022 Dec;15(4):323-339. doi: 10.1007/s12194-022-00672-4. Epub 2022 Sep 6.
When a radiotracer is injected into a patient's body as part of a nuclear medicine investigation, the entire body is exposed to the ionizing radiation emitted, which can cause biological damage. Therefore, it is important to predict the internal radiation dose to properly balance the advantages of radiological examinations. Currently, various Monte Carlo tools, such as MCNP, Geant4, and GATE, are available to estimate internal radiation dosimetry-related quantities, such as S values (S) and specific absorbed fractions (SAF). Such codes make physics easier for physicists who are experienced with computer programming; however, programming and/or simulation inputs remain a time-consuming and intensive task. In this study, we present a newly developed Geant4-based code for internal dosimetry calculations, namely "DoseCalcs". To assess the performance of the geometrical methods and computational capabilities of our developed tool, we used the GDML, TEXT, STL, and C++ methods to model the ORNL adult phantom, and a voxel-based structure to construct the ICRP adult male. SAFs in the ORNL and ICRP adult male phantoms for eight discrete mono-energetic photons with energies ranging from 0.01 to 2 MeV are calculated with DoseCalcs and compared to ORNL and OpenDose reference data. The two phantoms showed good agreement with both references, which indicates the accuracy of DoseCalcs for subsequent use in estimating internal dosimetry quantities using a variety of geometrical methods.
当放射性示踪剂作为核医学研究的一部分被注入患者体内时，整个身体都会受到发射的电离辐射的照射，这可能会导致生物损伤。因此，重要的是要预测内部辐射剂量，以正确平衡放射性检查的优势。目前，有各种蒙特卡罗工具，如 MCNP、Geant4 和 GATE，可用于估算与内部辐射剂量学相关的数量，如 S 值（S）和特定吸收分数（SAF）。这些代码使有计算机编程经验的物理学家更容易处理物理问题；然而，编程和/或模拟输入仍然是一项耗时且密集的任务。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种新开发的基于 Geant4 的内部剂量计算代码，即“DoseCalcs”。为了评估我们开发的工具的几何方法和计算能力的性能，我们使用 GDML、TEXT、STL 和 C++方法对 ORNL 成人模型进行建模，并使用体素结构构建了 ICRP 成年男性模型。使用 DoseCalcs 计算了 ORNL 和 ICRP 成年男性模型中八个离散单能光子的 SAF，能量范围从 0.01 到 2 MeV，并与 ORNL 和 OpenDose 参考数据进行了比较。这两个模型与两个参考模型都非常吻合，这表明 DoseCalcs 可以用于后续使用各种几何方法来估计内部剂量学数量。
