Technical note : Simulation of lung counting applications using Geant4

Abstract

A Geant4 simulation package has been developed to investigate and test detector configurations for lung counting applications. The objective of this study was to measure radiation emitted from the human body and to make a qualitative comparison of the results of the simulation with an experiment. Experimental data were measured from a plastic phantom with a set of lungs containing 241Am activity. For comparison, simulations in which 241Am activity was uniformly distributed inside the lungs of the ICRP adult reference computational phantom were made. The attenuation of photons by the chest wall was simulated and from this photopeak efficiency and photon transmission were calculated as a function of photon energy. The transmission of 59.5 keV gamma rays, characteristic of the decay of 241Am, was determined from the computational phantom as a function of the angular position of the detector. It was found that the simulated detector response corresponds well with that from an experiment. The simulated count rate below 100 keV was 10.0(7) % greater compared to the experimental measurement. It was observed that 58.3(4) % of photons are attenuated for energies below 100 keV by the chest wall. In the simulation, the transmission of 59.5 keV gamma rays varied from 13.8(2) % to 38.0(4) % as a function of the angular position of the detector. The results obtained from the simulations show a satisfactory agreement with experimental data and the package can be used in the development of future body counting applications and enables optimization of the detection geometry.