Nuclear Engineering and Technology (Nov 2023)

Implementation of Visible monkey into general-purpose Monte Carlo codes: MCNP, PHITS, and Geant4

  • Soo Min Lee,
  • Chansoo Choi,
  • Bangho Shin,
  • Yumi Lee,
  • Ji Won Choi,
  • Bo-Wi Cheon,
  • Chul Hee Min,
  • Beom Sun Chung,
  • Hyun Joon Choi,
  • Yeon Soo Yeom

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 55, no. 11
pp. 4019 – 4025

Abstract

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Recently, a new monkey computational phantom, called Visible Monkey, was developed for non-ionizing radiation studies in animal research. In this study, we extended its applications to ionizing radiation studies by implementing the voxel model of the Visible Monkey into three general-purpose Monte Carlo (MC) codes: MCNP6, PHITS, and Geant4. The implementation work for MCNP and PHITS was conducted using the LATTICE, UNIVERSE, and FILL cards. The G4VNestedParameterisation class was used for Geant4. Then, organ dose coefficients (DCs) for idealized photon beams in the antero-posterior direction were calculated using the three codes and compared, showing excellent agreement (differences <3%). Additionally, organ DCs in other directions (postero-anterior, left-lateral, and right-lateral) were calculated and compared with those of the newborn and 1-year-old reference phantoms. Significant differences were observed (e.g., the stomach DC of the monkey was 5-fold greater than that of the 1-year-old phantom at 0.03 MeV) while the differences tended to decrease with increasing energy (mostly <20% at 10 MeV). The results of this study allows conducting MC simulations using the Visible Monkey to estimate organ-level doses, which should be valuable to support/improve monkey experiments involving ionizing radiation exposures.

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