NUMERICAL ASSESSMENT OF 131I DEPOSITED IN THYROID FOR NON-STANDARD SITUATIONS

At the CIEMAT whole-body counter, a low-energy germanium detector is used for the in vivo assessment of (131)I activity in thyroid, mainly for the individual monitoring programmes of workers. The detector is calibrated with a cylindrical neck phantom made of polymethyl methacrylate that mimics the neck of an adult, containing a vial with a radioactive solution. For an accurate activity assessment, it is necessary to perform the calibration of the detector with phantoms that closely reproduce the anatomy of a real person. Nevertheless, it is not affordable to count on a variety of physical phantoms covering the different anatomical characteristics that could be found over the whole population, including children. An alternative approach to face this situation is offered by the numerical calibration procedure based on Monte Carlo calculations in conjunction with realistic voxel phantoms. A series of computational voxel phantoms of different ages and dimensions have been used in this work to simulate an internal contamination of the thyroid and to estimate the response of the detector for measurements involving individuals whose anatomical characteristics differ from the reference adult man.