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Background: In nuclear medicine application often it is required to use computational methods for evaluation of organ absorbed dose. Monte Carlo simulation and phantoms have been used in many works before. The shape, size and volume in organs are varied, and this variation will produce error in dose calculation if no correction is applied. Materials and Methods: A computational framework for constructing individual phantom for dosimetry was performed on five liver CT scan data sets of Japanese normal individuals. The Zubal phantom was used as an original phantom to be adjusted by each individual data set. This registration was done by Spherical Harmonics (SH) and Thin-Plate Spline methods. Hausdorff distance was calculated for each case. Results: Result of Hausdorff distance for five individual phantoms showed that before registration ranged from 140.9 to 192.1, and after registration it changed to 52.5 to 76.7. This was caused by index similarity ranged from %56.4 to %70.3. Conclusion: A new and automatic three-dimensional (3D) phantom construction approach was suggested for individual internal dosimetry simulation via Spherical Harmonics (SH) and Thin-Plate Spline methods. The results showed that the individual comparable phantom can be calculated with acceptable accuracy using geometric registration. This method could be used for race-specific statistical phantom modeling with major application in nuclear medicine for absorbed dose calculation. Iran. J. Radiat. Res., 2010 7 (4): 201-206

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Background: Making use of the orthovoltage machines in Radiotherapy, is one of the routine methods for the treatment of the superficial lesions. In this study, an important determinant of X-ray quality, the HVL (Half Value Layer), has been evaluated. Materials and Methods: The HVLs of a orthovoltage X-ray machine in 120 and 180 kVp are measured, using an empirical method, in which the HVLs are derived from the absorption curves. The measured HVLs are compared with calculated (Monte Carlo simulation) HVLs. Using the BEAMDP code of simulation, the output spectra are obtained and employed for the measurement of the HVLs. Results: Comparing the calculated and measured HVL values, the results show that the highest and lowest differences between the two are 4.96% and 2.27%, respectively, which are, in fairly good agreement with those obtained in the former studies. Conclusion: This study shows that the EGSnrc simulation code is capable of being used for the extraction of the quality indices for the superficial X-ray radiotherapy machines. It seems that, the mentioned code, with the mentioned experimental method, can be employed as a routine clinical test tool for every superficial radiotherapy department.