Development of Iranian Adult Female Reference Phantom for Internal Dosimetry Calculations

Estimation of organ doses in diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine procedures is an area of particular concern for radiation protection, in all over the world. The stylized computational phantoms have contributed significantly to radiation dosimetry in nuclear medicine; however, their simplified treatment of human anatomy is being criticized. Due to the fact that the ICRP adult reference phantoms are representative of Caucasian population, dose estimation within other ethnic/racial groups was recommended. In this study, an Iranian adult female reference phantom has been developed and internal dosimetry calculations have been performed for several radiopharmaceutical labelled with beta-, gamma- and positron-emitting radionuclides incorporated into Iranian and ICRP adult female reference phantoms. For main source and target organs, the ratios of S values between ICRP reference phantom to Iranian reference phantom for I-131, Tc-99m and F-18 are 0.54-1.23, 0.54-1.15 and 0.77-1.79, respectively. Therefore, construction of a reference phantom proportional to Iranian ethnicity for both gender in all age groups and performing internal dosimetry calculations to create a library of internal dosimetric data for Iranian patients were confirmed clearly.