Calculating equivalent dose received from a patient undergoing nuclear medicine procedure by merge phantoms tool and GAMOS/Geant4 6.0.0 software

Abstract

Purpose: This report introduces a tool for merging two voxel phantoms to calculate the deposited dose that a person receives from a patient undergoing Nuclear medicine procedures.

Materials and methods: The phantoms must be converted to the text format used by GEANT4 to treat DICOM images via the GAMOS utilities. The Merge Phantoms Tool can merge two phantoms in two different cases: standing either side by side or opposite. The merged phantom is also in text format and is subsequently input back into GAMOS to calculate the equivalent dose that a person receives from a patient. The equivalent doses to the eyes of people in contact are calculated in a case where a patient was administered 185 MBq of 18F-FDG during a PET examination.

Results: The corresponding doses when the two phantoms are standing opposite are greater than those when they are standing side by side and smaller than those from point and tube source calculated by Sumi Yokoyama at any distance.

Conclusions: The Merge phantoms tool and GAMOS software can be used to calculate the deposited dose that a person receives from a patient. An accurate dose calculation can be used for radiation protection, or deciding whether a patient can be released from isolation if the dose is small even in a close contact.

Keywords: DICOM; Equivalent dose; GAMOS; GEANT4; Nuclear medicine; Phantom merging.