• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.2195-2207
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• 2024

To enhance skeletal dosimetry in conjunction with the adult mesh-type reference Korean phantoms (MRKPs), Korean/Asian photon fluence-to-skeletal dose response functions (DRFs) were established utilizing an updated version of micro-CT-based detailed bone models from Tsinghua University. These bone models were incorporated into the MRKPs using the parallel geometry feature of Geant4. We calculated bone-site-specific electron absorbed fractions and used them to generate DRFs, following a similar methodology employed for ICRP-116 DRFs that have been used with the ICRP reference phantoms for skeletal dosimetry. To assess dosimetric implications of the Korean/Asian DRFs, we calculated RBM and BE doses for the MRKPs exposed to photon beams in the antero-posterior direction using the Korean/Asian and ICRP-116 DRFs. For energies ≥200 keV, the Korean/Asian DRFs-based skeletal doses exhibited excellent agreement with the ICRP-116 DRFs-based skeletal doses, attributed to the existence of charged particle equilibrium across the bone site. Conversely, significant differences of up to ~2.3 times were observed at lower energies, due to differences in the skeletal tissue distributions of bone models used to derive the Korean/Asian and ICRP-116 DRFs. The DRFs established in this study are expected to yield more accurate skeletal doses for Korean and Asian populations compared to the ICRP-116 DRFs.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1949-1958
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• 2023

The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) Publication 116 was released to provide a comprehensive dataset of the dose coefficients (DCs) for external exposures produced with the adult reference voxel phantoms of ICRP Publication 110. Although an advanced skeletal dosimetry method for photons and neutrons using fluence-to-dose response functions (DRFs) was introduced in ICRP Publication 116, the ICRP-116 skeletal DCs were calculated by using the simple method conventionally used (i.e., doses to red bone marrow and endosteum approximated by doses to spongiosa and/or medullary cavities). In the present study, the photon and neutron DRFs were used to produce skeletal DCs of the ICRP-110 reference phantoms, which were then compared with the ICRP-116 DCs. For photons, there were significant differences by up to ~2.8 times especially at energies <0.3 MeV. For neutrons, the differences were generally small over the entire energy region (mostly <20%). The general impact of the DRF-based skeletal DCs on the effective dose calculations was negligibly small, supporting the validity of the ICRP-116 effective DCs despite their skeletal DCs derived from the simple method. Meanwhile, we believe that the DRF-based skeletal DCs could be beneficial in better estimates of skeletal doses of individuals for risk assessments.