EURADOS intercomparison exercise on MC modeling for the in-vivo monitoring of Am-241 in skull phantoms (Part I)

An intercomparison on in-vivo monitoring for determination of Am-241 in three skull phantoms was launched by EURADOS in 2011. The project focused on the measurement and estimation of Am-241 activity in the human skull. Three human skull phantoms of different complexity were used. A Monte Carlo (MC) exercise with the voxel representations of the real phantoms was also launched in September 2012. The main goals of the project were to investigate the use of MC techniques for efficiency calibrations for body monitoring systems for a special calibration exercise and compare the approaches of participating laboratories. The full MC exercise consisted of three tasks with increasing difficulty, to test the extent of the skills of each participating laboratory. The first task in this intercomparison was to simulate a specified detector and a well defined semi-skull phantom. All parameters of the simulation, including photon yield, material property and geometry were fixed. This paper provides an overview of the participants' results and analyses of the issues presented by this first task. The majority of the responses did not need any correction and the number of incorrect results was less than in a previous exercise of a similar kind. Overall knowledge in this research area utilising MC techniques appears to have improved and the repetition of the intercomparison exercise has positively affected the skills of the participating laboratories. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.