Crews working on present-day jet aircraft are a large occupationally exposed group with a relatively high average effective dose from galactic cosmic radiation. Crews of future high-speed commercial flying at higher altitudes would be even more exposed. To help reduce the significant uncertainties in calculations of such exposures, the male adult voxels phantom MAX, developed in the Nuclear Ene...

PURPOSE In this article, we evaluate a plastic scintillation detector system for quality assurance in proton therapy using a BC-408 plastic scintillator, a commercial camera, and a computer. METHODS The basic characteristics of the system were assessed in a series of proton irradiations. The reproducibility and response to changes of dose, dose-rate, and proton energy were determined. Photogr...

This work presents an application case study. Geant4 is a 750,000 line toolkit first designed in the mid-1990s and originally intended only for sequential computation. Intel’s promise of an 80-core CPU meant that Geant4 users would have to struggle in the future with 80 processes on one CPU chip, each one having a gigabyte memory footprint. Thread parallelism would be desirable. A semiautomatic...

Monte Carlo simulations are increasingly used in scintigraphic imaging to model imaging systems and to develop and assess tomographic reconstruction algorithms and correction methods for improved image quantitation. GATE (GEANT4 application for tomographic emission) is a new Monte Carlo simulation platform based on GEANT4 dedicated to nuclear imaging applications. This paper describes the GATE ...

Mean glandular dose (MGD) is the main dosimetric quantity in mammography. MGD evaluation is obtained by multiplying the entrance skin air kerma (ESAK) by normalized glandular dose (DgN) coefficients. While ESAK is an empirical quantity, DgN coefficients can only be estimated with Monte Carlo (MC) methods. Thus, a MC parameters benchmark is needed for effectively evaluating DgN coefficients. GEA...

Neutron stimulated emission computed tomography (NSECT) is being developed as a non-invasive technique to diagnose iron overload in the liver. It uses inelastic scatter interactions between fast neutrons and iron nuclei to quantify localized distributions of iron within the liver. Preliminary studies have demonstrated the feasibility of iron overload detection through NSECT using a Monte-Carlo ...

Recently the number of hadron therapy facilities has been increasing rapidly. Some of them are designed for heavy ions and need a tool to simulate the passage of ions through matter. As well, the space engineering field requires good estimates of device damage caused by bombarding ions in cosmic rays. As a result, demands for detailed simulations of nucleus-nucleus interactions have increased. ...

Dose distribution evaluation in oncological radiotherapy treatments is an outstanding problem that requires sophisticated computing technologies to optimize the clinical results (i.e. increase the dose to the tumour and reduce the dose to the healthy tissues). Nowdays, dose calculation algorithms based on the Monte Carlo method are generally regarded as the most accurate tools for radiotherapy....

The GEANT4 code offers an extensive set of hadronic models for various projectiles and energy ranges. These models include theoretical, parameterized and, for low energy neutrons, data driven models. Theoretical or semiempirical models sometimes cannot reproduce experimental data at low energies (<100MeV), especially for low Z elements, and therefore recent GEANT4 developments included a new pa...