A revised model for electron dosimetry in the human small intestine

In this study, the absorbed dose was calculated to the small intestine (SI) wall of an adult human from electrons in its lumen contents. The effects on dose due to variations in the lumen radius and wall-thickness also were studied. The SI model was based on values gleaned from anatomic and histologic reviews of the adult human SI. Histologic and radiological analyses of the SI suggested the microscopic intricacy of this walled organ could be avoided for dosimetric purposes and a set of concentric cylinders could be used to model the SI. The model was input into the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) version 4A computational package, which was used to simulate energy deposition in the SI by electrons of fifty discrete energies ranging 10-500 keV. The source electrons as well as all resulting particles, such as knock-on electrons, bremsstrahlung, and electrons created from bremsstrahlung interactions, were transported until the particle energies fell below the 1 keV low-energy cutoff. Detailed physics treatments for secondary photons were made. With a reasonable number of histories, appropriate variance reduction techniques were used to improve the precision of the Monte Carlo calculations. The model used very small tally regions, which ranged in thickness from 0.5 microm to 200 microm depending on the electron energy studied and tally location in the wall. Relative errors associated with these calculations were maintained at less than 5%. The large number of tally results across the wall for each of the energies studied enabled the construction of the energy-specific depth dose curves in the wall. Each of these curves was consistent with the anticipated energy deposition pattern. These curves showed that only a small fraction of the energy absorbed at the contents-mucus interface reaches the stem cell layers because the cells are located deep in the mucosa. This fraction was found to vary from 1.66 x 10(-6) to 1.21 x 10(-1) over the energy range 10-500 keV. These results demonstrated the interface dose, which has been routinely reported as the "wall" dose, is a significant overestimate of the actual dose to the stem cells. The dose uncertainties associated with variations of the critical cell depth were shown to be very high for electrons whose CSDA ranges in the soft tissue exceeded the depth of the critical cells. This study showed that the uncertainty in the wall-thickness had no effect on depth doses while variation in the lumen radius significantly changes depth doses. The results suggest that these changes could be approximated by the inverse square of the lumen radius.