Development of voxel phantom representing reference Korean female for use in radiation protection dosimetry

This paper describes the procedures that have been used for the construction of the reference Korean female phantom, HDRK-Woman. The phantom was developed using the high-resolution color slice images obtained from an adult Korean female cadaver (160 cm, 52.35 kg). A total of 40 organs were segmented including the 27 organs specified in ICRP 103 for effective dose calculation. The voxel resolution of the unadjusted phantom was 2 × 2 × 2 mm³ (i.e., 261 × 109 × 825 voxels). Then, the voxel resolution was changed to 2.0351 × 2.0351 × 2.0747 mm³ in order to adjust the height and total bone mass of the phantom to the Reference Korean data. Finally, the internal organs and tissue were adjusted with an in-house software program that had been developed for 3D volume adjustment of the organs and tissue. The developed phantom, HDRK-Woman, was then ported to MCNPX to calculate effective dose values for several irradiation geometries (AP, PA, and LLAT) of the broad parallel photon beam. The calculated effective dose values were finally compared with the results of the ICRP reference phantoms. (author)