Assessment of Organ Doses for a Glovebox Worker Using Realistic Postures with PIMAL and VOXMAT

In an earlier effort, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) mathematical phantom has been revised to enable assessment of radiation dose for different postures in occupational exposures by enabling freely positioning arms and legs. The revised phantom is called PIMAL: Phantom wIth Moving Arms and Legs. Further, to assist the analyst with input preparation and output manipulation for different postures, a graphical user interface has been developed. Also, at ORNL a hybrid computational phantom, which uses a combination of voxelized and stylized geometry, for radiation dose assessment was recently developed. This phantom is based on the International Commission on Radiological Protection's (ICRP's) male phantom model and is called VOXMAT. For VOXMAT, the head and torso, which contain significant anatomical details, were described using voxel geometry. The arms and legs, which contain less-detailed anatomical structures, were modeled using the mathematical equations (stylized approach). With this approach the number of voxels was reduced from 7 million to 2.3 million, which translated into a proportional reduction in computational time and memory requirements. More importantly, VOXMAT allows easy the movement of arms and legs for radiation dose assessment for realistic postures. To determine/demonstrate the importance of the realistic posture for a case study, PIMALmore » and VOXMAT are applied to assess the dose to a glovebox worker. In this paper, the comparative computational results for the estimated dose are presented.« less