Dose conversion coefficients for Chinese reference adult male and female voxel phantoms from idealized neutron exposures

TL;DR

This study develops and compares neutron dose conversion coefficients for Chinese adult voxel phantoms with existing Caucasian-based data, revealing generally good agreement but notable discrepancies in certain organs and geometries at specific energies.

Contribution

The paper introduces new dose conversion coefficients based on Chinese-specific voxel phantoms, adjusting previous models and providing comparative analysis with ICRP data.

Findings

Most organ dose coefficients agree with ICRP 116.

Effective dose coefficients are similar above 2 MeV.

Significant differences occur at energies below 1 MeV in some geometries.

Abstract

A new set of fluence-to-dose conversion coefficients based on the Chinese reference adult voxel phantoms CRAM and CRAF are presented for six idealized external neutron exposures from 10-8 MeV to 20 MeV. The voxel phantoms CRAM and CRAF were adjusted from the previous phantoms CNMAN and CNWM respectively, and the masses of individual organs have been adjusted to the Chinese reference data. The calculation of organ-absorbed doses and effective doses were performed with the Monte Carlo transport code MCNPX. The resulting dose conversion coefficients were compared with those published in ICRP Publication 116, which represents the reference Caucasian. The organ-absorbed dose conversion coefficients of most organs are in good agreement with the results in ICRP Publication 116, however, obvious discrepancies are observed for some organs and certain geometries. For neutrons with energies above 2 MeV, the effective dose conversion coefficients of Chinese reference adult are almost identical to those of ICRP Publication 116 in AP, PA, ROT and ISO geometries. When energies range from 10-8 MeV to 1 MeV, differences are within 10% in AP (5%), PA (8%) and ROT (-4%) geometries. However, relatively large discrepancies are shown in lateral and ISO geometries when energies are below 1 MeV, with differences of -15% for LLAT, -20% for RLAT and -12% for ISO, respectively.