individual virtual phantom reconstruction for organ dosimetry based on standard available phantoms

background: in nuclear medicine application often it is required to use computational methods for evaluation of organ absorbed dose. monte carlo simulation and phantoms have been used in many works before. the shape, size and volume in organs are varied, and this variation will produce error in dose calculation if no correction is applied. materials and methods: a computational framework for constructing individual phantom for dosimetry was performed on five liver ct scan data sets of japanese normal individuals. the zubal phantom was used as an original phantom to be adjusted by each individual data set. this registration was done by spherical harmonics (sh) and thin-plate spline methods. hausdorff distance was calculated for each case. results: result of hausdorff distance for five individual phantoms showed that before registration ranged from 140.9 to 192.1, and after registration it changed to 52.5 to 76.7. this was caused by index similarity ranged from %56.4 to %70.3. conclusion: a new and automatic three-dimensional (3d) phantom construction approach was suggested for individual internal dosimetry simulation via spherical harmonics (sh) and thin-plate spline methods. the results showed that the individual comparable phantom can be calculated with acceptable accuracy using geometric registration. this method could be used for race-specific statistical phantom modeling with major application in nuclear medicine for absorbed dose calculation. iran. j. radiat. res., 2010 7 (4): 201-206