Establishment of the detailed breast model of Chinese adult female and application in external radiation protection

Breast is one of the most sensitive organs to radiation. In 2007, International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) increased the tissue weighting factor for the breast from 0.05 to 0.12, which made the accurate evaluation of breast dose more important. But in the existing human voxel phantom, the structure of breast is not elaborate enough because of the limitation of image resolution used for phantom modeling. This will probably affect the accuracy of breast dose calculated in simulation. Some researches on detailed breast modeling have been carried out, but there is no such research in this field in China. A detailed breast model for Chinese adult female is established in this article using the mathematical modeling method. It is voxelised and merged with the Chinese reference adult female voxel model for breast dosimetry. Dose conversion coefficients of breast gland for external photon exposures in antero-posterior geometry are calculated as an example of the application and the results are compared with those calculated by the old voxel phantom and ICRP reference adult female voxel phantom. (authors)