Abstract

Internal dose calculations for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in nuclear medicine are based currently on standardized computational phantoms for reference adults, children, and pregnant women. In contrast to external beam therapy, in which a patient- individualized computational phantom is developed for each patient, doses from these standardized subjects may be modified using patient-specific values of organ mass, for example. New technologies promise a new era for dose calculations, one in which image- based computational phantoms may be used to develop more truly patient-specific dosimetry. For the present, however, standardized dose calculations predominate. This chapter examines the state of the art in this field, with descriptions of standard computational phantoms and methods for obtaining these estimates.