OEDIPE : A Personalised Internal Dosimetric Tool Associating Voxel- Based Phantoms with Monte Carlo Calculation for Nuclear Medicine

In nuclear medicine and particularly in internal radiotherapy, one of the major challenges is to determine the dose for each patient. Current internal dosimetric estimations are based on the Medical Internal Radiation Dose (MIRD) formalism and use standard mathematical models. These standard models are often far from a given patient morphology and do not allow to perform patient-specific dosimetry. Therefore, the Laboratory of Internal Dose Assessment of IRSN has developed an innovative software named OEDIPE, French acronym for “tool for personalised internal dose assessment”, in collaboration with the French institute of health and medical research of Nantes (U892). This software is a user-friendly graphical interface that takes into account specific patient parameters. Indeed, it allows the creation of voxel phantoms based on the patient anatomical image and directly prepares the MCNPX input file suitable for dose calculations. Radionuclides can be distributed at the organ and voxel scale, using cumulated activities based on tomographic images. Absorbed dose calculation can also be performed at these scales, in allowing notably the visualisation of superimposed isodose curves and anatomical images. It could also take into account the temporal distribution of radiopharmaceuticals within the body. OEDIPE has already been validated by comparison either with others codes and with experimental data. The study presented here is a first approach in internal radiotherapy. It deals with a personalised dose calculation carried out for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. Thus, as a result of its flexibility in accommodating complex geometry, the method developed not only represents a diagnostic tool, but also opens up exciting new possibilities such as the optimisation of protocols, in nuclear medicine and in particular in targeted radiotherapy.