Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

The effect of gender and remainder on effective dose equivalent

Conference · · Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; (USA)
OSTI ID:5551971

Effective dose equivalent methodology, as recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection in ICRP-26, may be implemented for routine evaluation of occupational exposures to external sources of penetrating radiation, such as neutrons and photons. The calculational techniques for determining effective dose equivalent are being developed and evaluated at Pacific Northwest Laboratories. These studies show that the estimated effective dose equivalent is strongly influenced by several factors, including the source energy, source geometry, phantom gender type, and remainder scheme used. Since the concept of effective dose equivalent relies on determining organ doses, the organ doses for these studies were calculated using the MIRD-V mathematical phantom and MCNP, a general-purpose Monte Carlo neutron and photon transport code. Calculations of organ doses were performed for several irradiation geometries at a series of energies from 10 keV to 10 MeV. The geometries were the anterior-posterior (AP) parallel beam, the posterior-anterior parallel beam, the lateral parallel beam, and an isotropic field. These calculations were performed for both the male and female phantoms. For whole-body irradiations, the use of sex-specific weighting factors instead of the average values can result in large differences in the effective dose equivalent. The largest differences were found for the case of the male phantom in an AP beam.

OSTI ID:
5551971
Report Number(s):
CONF-881011--
Journal Information:
Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; (USA), Journal Name: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; (USA) Vol. 57; ISSN TANSA; ISSN 0003-018X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English