Monte Carlo calculation of specific absorbed fractions: variance reduction techniques

The purpose of the present work is to calculate specific absorbed fractions using variance reduction techniques and assess the effectiveness of these techniques in improving the efficiency (i.e. reducing the statistical uncertainties) of simulation results in cases where the distance between the source and the target organs is large and/or the target organ is small. The variance reduction techniques of interaction forcing and an ant colony algorithm, which drives the application of splitting and Russian roulette, were applied in Monte Carlo calculations performed with the code penelope for photons with energies from 30 keV to 2 MeV. In the simulations we used a mathematical phantom derived from the well-known MIRD-type adult phantom. The thyroid gland was assumed to be the source organ and urinary bladder, testicles, uterus and ovaries were considered as target organs. Simulations were performed, for each target organ and for photons with different energies, using these variance reduction techniques, all run on the same processor and during a CPU time of 1.5 · 10(5) s. For energies above 100 keV both interaction forcing and the ant colony method allowed reaching relative uncertainties of the average absorbed dose in the target organs below 4% in all studied cases. When these two techniques were used together, the uncertainty was further reduced, by a factor of 0.5 or less. For photons with energies below 100 keV, an adapted initialization of the ant colony algorithm was required. By using interaction forcing and the ant colony algorithm, realistic values of the specific absorbed fractions can be obtained with relative uncertainties small enough to permit discriminating among simulations performed with different Monte Carlo codes and phantoms. The methodology described in the present work can be employed to calculate specific absorbed fractions for arbitrary arrangements, i.e. energy spectrum of primary radiation, phantom model and source and target organs.