The development and application of the visible Chinese human model for Monte Carlo dose calculations

A new whole-body computational phantom, the Visible Chinese Human (VCH), was developed using high-resolution transversal photographs of a Chinese adult male cadaver. Following the segmentation and tridimensional reconstruction, a voxel-based model that faithfully represented the average anatomical characteristics of the Chinese population was established for radiation dosimetry. The vascular system of VCH was fully preserved, and the cadaver specimen was processed in the standing posture. A total of 8,920 slices were obtained by continuous sectioning at 0.2 mm intervals, and 48 organs and tissues were segmented from the tomographic color images at 5440 x 4080 pixel resolution, corresponding to a voxel size of 0.1 x 0.1 x 0.2 mm3. The resulting VCH computational phantom, consisting of 230 x 120 x 892 voxels with a unit volume of 2 x 2 x 2 mm3, was ported into Monte Carlo code MCNPX2.5 to calculate the conversion coefficients from kerma free-in-air to absorbed dose and to effective dose for external monoenergetic photon beams from 15 keV to 10 MeV under six idealized external irradiation geometries (anterior-posterior, posterior-anterior, left lateral, right lateral, rotational, and isotropic). Organ masses of the VCH model are fairly different from other human phantoms. Differences of up to 300% are observed between doses from ICRP 74 data and those of VIP-Man. Detailed information from the VCH model is able to improve the radiological datasets, particular for the Chinese population, and provide insights into the research of various computational phantoms.