Selection of important Monte Carlo histories

The 1986 Dosimetry System (DS86) for Japanese A-bomb survivors uses information describing the behavior of individual radiation particles, simulated by Monte Carlo methods, to calculate the transmission of radiation into structures and, thence, into humans. However, there are practical constraints on the number of such particle 'histories' that may be used. First, the number must be sufficiently high to provide adequate statistical precision fir any calculated quantity of interest. For integral quantities, such as dose or kerma, statistical precision of approximately 5% (standard deviation) is required to ensure that statistical uncertainties are not a major contributor to the overall uncertainty of the transmitted value. For differential quantities, such as scalar fluence spectra, 10 to 15% standard deviation on individual energy groups is adequate. Second, the number of histories cannot be so large as to require an unacceptably large amount of computer time to process the entire survivor data base. Given that there are approx. 30,000 survivors, each having 13 or 14 organs of interest, the number of histories per organ must be constrained to less than several ten's of thousands at the very most. Selection and use of the most important Monte Carlo leakage histories from among all those calculated allows the creation of an efficient house and organ radiation transmission system for use at RERF. While attempts have been made during the adjoint Monte Carlo calculation to bias the histories toward an efficient dose estimate, this effort has been far from satisfactory. Many of the adjoint histories on a typical leakage tape are either starting in an energy group in which there is very little kerma or dose or leaking into an energy group with very little free-field couple with. By knowing the typical free-field fluence and the fluence-to-dose factors with which the leaking histories will be used, one can select histories rom a leakage tape that will contribute to dose and reject the histories which add little dose information. As will be shown, a large number of histories can be rejected without causing an unacceptable increase in the statistical uncertainty of the desired dose calculation