• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.50-57
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• 2019

In pediatric thoracic CT, respiratory motion is generally treated as a motion artifact degrading the image quality. Conversely, respiratory motion in the thorax can be used to answer important clinical questions, that cannot be assessed adequately via conventional static thoracic CT, by utilizing four-dimensional (4D) CT. However, clinical experiences of 4D thoracic CT are quite limited. In order to use 4D thoracic CT properly, imagers should understand imaging techniques, radiation dose optimization methods, and normal as well as typical abnormal imaging appearances. In this article, the imaging techniques of pediatric thoracic 4D CT are reviewed with an emphasis on radiation dose. In addition, several clinical applications of pediatric 4D thoracic CT are addressed in various thoracic functional abnormalities, including upper airway obstruction, tracheobronchomalacia, pulmonary air trapping, abnormal diaphragmatic motion, and tumor invasion. One may further explore the clinical usefulness of 4D thoracic CT in free-breathing children, which can enrich one's clinical practice.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.555-564
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• 2017

The current radiation risk assessment for occupational exposure is based on the measured exposure dose and health checkups of workers. This people-centered risk assessment may occur errors because absence of using personal dosimeter or unrelated health symptoms of individuals lead to difficulties in obtaining accurate data from workers. In addition, although the established legal upper dose limit was used as a reference for the assessment, it does not imply that this limit is the optimal dose of radiation workers should get; ALARA principle should always be appreciated. Therefore, a new risk assessment model that can take account of all the important factors and implement optimization of radiation protection is required at the national level. In this paper, based on the KOSHA Risk Assessment, we studied on the workplace-centered risk assessment model for radiation field rather than the people-centered. The result of the study derived a right model for radiation field through the analysis of the risk assessment methods in various fields and also found data acquisition methods and procedures for applying to the model. Multidimensional model centering on the workplace will enables more accurate radiation risk assessment by using a risk index and radar plot, and consequently contribute to the efficient worker management, preemptive worker protection and implementation of optimization of radiation protection.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.80-80
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• 2006

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.27-34
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• 1997

In radiation therapy, the goal of three dimensional conformal radiation therapy(3DCRT) is to conform the apatial distribution of the prescribed radiation dose to the precise 3D configuration of the tomor, and at the same time, to minimize the dose to the surrounding normal tissues. To optimize treatment volume of tomor, treatment volume will be same tomor volume. Biological considerations need to be incorporated in the intensity modulation optimization process. Planning of intensity modulated treatment can irradiate more 20％ in tomor compare to conventional 3DCRT. In lung cancer and rectal cancer, planning of intensity modulated treatment showed optimizing dose distribution.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.66-72
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• 2018

The proper position of a multi-leaf collimator (MLC) is essential for the quality of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc radiotherapy (VMAT) dose delivery. Task Group (TG) 142 provides a quality assurance (QA) procedure for MLC position. Our study investigated the QA validation of the mechanical leaf gap measurement and the maintenance procedure. Two $VitalBeam^{TM}$ systems were evaluated to validate the acceptance of an MLC position. The dosimetric leaf gaps (DLGs) were measured for 6 MV, 6 MVFFF, 10 MV, and 15 MV photon beams. A solid water phantom was irradiated using $10{\times}10cm^2$ field size at source-to-surface distance (SSD) of 90 cm and depth of 10 cm. The portal dose image prediction (PDIP) calculation was implemented on a treatment planning system (TPS) called $Eclipse^{TM}$. A total of 20 VMAT plans were used to confirm the accuracy of dose distribution measured by an electronic portal imaging device (EPID) and those predicted by VMAT plans. The measured leaf gaps were 0.30 mm and 0.35 mm for VitalBeam 1 and 2, respectively. The DLG values decreased by an average of 6.9% and 5.9% after mechanical MLC adjustment. Although the passing rates increased slightly, by 1.5% (relative) and 1.2% (absolute) in arc 1, the average passing rates were still within the good dose delivery level (>95%). Our study shows the existence of a mechanical leaf gap error caused by a degenerated MLC motor. This can be recovered by reinitialization of MLC position on the machine control panel. Consequently, the QA procedure should be performed regularly to protect the MLC system.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.55-61
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• 2017

There are no recommended test conditions for digital photography in Chest PA examinations. However, each company recommends shooting examinations of the high voltage applied to the previous analog examination. The condition that satisfies the value of 200 ~ 800 which is the recommended Exposure Index value recommended by Philips was selected, and the dose was evaluated by Monte Carlo simulation, and the SNR and CNR were compared. As a result, it was possible to reduce the effective dose up to 77% by controlling the tube voltage, tube current, and additional filter, not the conventional high voltage imaging method. Although there were some differences according to the test conditions, the image evaluation results were similar to the images. We will compare the exposure dose according to changes in tube voltage, tube current, and additional filter at the digital chest radiograph and evaluate the image quality of the image to propose optimal conditions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.8
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• pp.2018-2025
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• 2019

This study systematically compared two hybrid deterministic/Monte Carlo transport codes, ADVANTG/MCNP and MAVRIC, in solving a difficult shielding problem for a real-world spent fuel storage cask. Both hybrid codes were developed based on the consistent adjoint driven importance sampling (CADIS) methodology but with different implementations. The dose rate distributions on the cask surface were of primary interest and their predicted results were compared with each other and with a straightforward MCNP calculation as a baseline case. Forward-Weighted CADIS was applied for optimization toward uniform statistical uncertainties for all tallies on the cask surface. Both ADVANTG/MCNP and MAVRIC achieved substantial improvements in overall computational efficiencies, especially for gamma-ray transport. Compared with the continuous-energy ADVANTG/MCNP calculations, the coarse-group MAVRIC calculations underestimated the neutron dose rates on the cask's side surface by an approximate factor of two and slightly overestimated the dose rates on the cask's top and side surfaces for fuel gamma and hardware gamma sources because of the impact of multigroup approximation. The fine-group MAVRIC calculations improved to a certain extent and the addition of continuous-energy treatment to the Monte Carlo code in the latest MAVRIC sequence greatly reduced these discrepancies. For the two continuous-energy calculations of ADVANTG/MCNP and MAVRIC, a remaining difference of approximately 30% between the neutron dose rates on the cask's side surface resulted from inconsistent use of thermal scattering treatment of hydrogen in concrete.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.150-156
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• 2018

This study aims to develop an improved Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) reconstruction algorithm using anisotropic total variation (ATV) minimization to enhance the image quality of low-dose cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). The algorithm first applies a filter that integrates the Shepp-Logan filter into a cosine window function on all projections for impulse noise removal. A total variation objective function with anisotropic penalty is then minimized to enhance the difference between the real structure and noise using the steepest gradient descent optimization with adaptive step sizes. The preserving parameter to adjust the separation between the noise-free and noisy areas is determined by calculating the cumulative distribution function of the gradient magnitude of the filtered image obtained by the application of the filtering operation on each projection. With these minimized ATV projections, voxel-driven backprojection is finally performed to generate the reconstructed images. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated with the catphan503 phantom dataset acquired with the use of a low-dose protocol. Qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that the proposed ATV minimization provides enhanced CBCT reconstruction images compared with those generated by the conventional FDK algorithm, with a higher contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), lower root-mean-square-error, and higher correlation. The proposed algorithm not only leads to a potential imaging dose reduction in repeated CBCT scans via lower mA levels, but also elicits high CNR values by removing noisy corrupted areas and by avoiding the heavy penalization of striking features.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.519-526
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• 2022

Electronic personal dosimeter (EPD) provide real time monitoring and a direct indication of the accumulated dose or dose rate in terms of personal dose. Most EPD do not perform well in low energy photon radiation fields present in medical radiation environments. It has poor responsibility and large error rate for low energy photon radiation of medical radiation environments. This study evaluated to optimal additional filtration for EPD using silicon PIN photodiode detector form 40 to 120 kVp range in medical radiation environments. From 40 to 80 kVp energy range, Al 0.2 mm and Sn 1.0 mm overlapped filtration showed good responsibility to dose rate and from 80 kVp to 120 kVp energy range, Al 0.2 mm and Sn 1.6 mm overlapped filtration showed good responsibility to dose rate.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.181-194
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• 2022

Internal dosimetry is a discipline which brings together a set of knowledge, tools and procedures for calculating the dose received after incorporation of radionuclides into the body. Several steps are necessary to calculate the committed effective dose (CED) for workers or members of the public. Each step uses the best available knowledge in the field of radionuclide biokinetics, energy deposition in organs and tissues, the efficiency of radiation to cause a stochastic effect, or in the contributions of individual organs and tissues to overall detriment from radiation. In all these fields, knowledge is abundant and supported by many works initiated several decades ago. That makes the CED a very robust quantity, representing exposure for reference persons in reference situation of exposure and to be used for optimization and assessment of compliance with dose limits. However, the CED suffers from certain limitations, accepted by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) for reasons of simplification. Some of its limitations deserve to be overcome and the ICRP is continuously working on this. Beyond the efforts to make the CED an even more reliable and precise tool, there is an increasing demand for personalized dosimetry, particularly in the medical field. To respond to this demand, currently available tools in dosimetry can be adjusted. However, this would require coupling these efforts with a better assessment of the individual risk, which would then have to consider the physiology of the persons concerned but also their lifestyle and medical history. Dosimetry and risk assessment are closely linked and can only be developed in parallel. This paper presents the state of the art of internal dosimetry knowledge and the limitations to be overcome both to make the CED more precise and to develop other dosimetric quantities, which would make it possible to better approximate the individual dose.