Development of a whole-body tetrahedral mesh human phantom for radiation dose calculations using new MCNP 6.1 geometrical features

摘要

In this study, we developed a whole-body phantom model based on adaptive tetrahedral meshing techniques by converting a set of segmented images of the Visible Human Project. The newly constructed phantom, called VIP-Man_(mesh) was implemented in MCNP6 to calculate organ doses from external beams of photons and electrons with energies less than 10 MeV in the anterior-posterior (AP) irradiation direction as well as to measure computation speed. The dose values were then compared with those for the previously developed voxel phantom, called VIP-Man_(voxel). It was found that the organ doses of tetrahedral mesh phantom and voxelized phantom are in good agreement for the photon exposures considered in this study. The computational speed of using tetrahedral mesh phantom is about three times slower than voxelized phantom. Although limited radiation types and irradiation geometries were tested, we are impressed by the performance. It is concluded that the tetrahedral mesh would be a promising geometric representation for human phantoms which could be accurately and effectively implemented in radiation transport codes such as the MCNP6.