ICRP Publication 116--the first ICRP/ICRU application of the male and female adult reference computational phantoms.

ICRP Publication 116 on 'Conversion coefficients for radiological protection quantities for external radiation exposures', provides fluence-to-dose conversion coefficients for organ-absorbed doses and effective dose for various types of external exposures (ICRP 2010 ICRP Publication 116). The publication supersedes the ICRP Publication 74 (ICRP 1996 ICRP Publication 74, ICRU 1998 ICRU Report 57), including new particle types and expanding the energy ranges considered. The coefficients were calculated using the ICRP/ICRU computational phantoms (ICRP 2009 ICRP Publication 110) representing the reference adult male and reference adult female (ICRP 2002 ICRP Publication 89), together with a variety of Monte Carlo codes simulating the radiation transport in the body.

Overview of the ICRP/ICRU adult reference computational phantoms and dose conversion coefficients for external idealised exposures.

This paper reviews the ICRP Publications 110 and 116 describing the reference computational phantoms and dose conversion coefficients for external exposures. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) in its 2007 Recommendations made several revisions to the methods of calculation of the protection quantities. In order to implement these recommendations, the DOCAL task group of the ICRP developed computational phantoms representing the reference adult male and female and then calculated a set of dose conversion coefficients for various types of idealised external exposures.

Modelling the influence of shielding on physical and biological organ doses.

Distributions of "physical" and "biological" dose in different organs were calculated by coupling the FLUKA MC transport code with a geometrical human phantom inserted into a shielding box of variable shape, thickness and material. While the expression "physical dose" refers to the amount of deposited energy per unit mass (in Gy), "biological dose" was modelled with "Complex Lesions" (CL), clustered DNA strand breaks calculated in a previous work based on "event-by-event" track-structure simulations. The yields of complex lesions per cell and per unit dose were calculated for different radiation types and energies, and integrated into a version of FLUKA modified for this purpose, allowing us to estimate the effects of mixed fields.