Improved estimates of the radiation absorbed dose to the urinary bladder wall

Abstract

Specific absorbed fractions (SAFs) have been calculated as a function of the content in the urinary bladder in order to allow more realistic calculations of the absorbed dose to the bladder wall. The SAFs were calculated using the urinary bladder anatomy from the ICRP male and female adult reference computational phantoms. The urinary bladder and its content were approximated by a sphere with a wall of constant mass, where the thickness of the wall depended on the amount of urine in the bladder. SAFs were calculated for males and females with 17 different urinary bladder volumes from 10 to 800 mL, using the Monte Carlo computer program MCNP5, at 25 energies of mono-energetic photons and electrons ranging from 10 KeV to 10 MeV. The decay was assumed to be homogeneously distributed in the urinary bladder content and the urinary bladder wall, and the mean absorbed dose to the urinary bladder wall was calculated. The Monte Carlo simulations were validated against measurements made with thermoluminescent dosimeters. The SAFs obtained for a urine volume of 200 mL were compared to the values calculated for the urinary bladder wall using the adult reference computational phantoms. The mean absorbed dose to the urinary wall from 18F-FDG was found to be 77 µGy/MBq formales and 86 µGy/MBq for females, while for 99mTc-DTPA the mean absorbed doses were 80 µGy/MBq for males and 86 µGy/MBq for females. Compared to calculations using a constant value of the SAF from the adult reference computational phantoms, the mean absorbed doses to the bladder wall were 60% higher for 18F-FDG and 30% higher for 99mTc-DTPA using the new SAFs.