ABSTRACT
The majority of human computational phantoms for radiation protection purposes, including stylized computational phantoms, have been constructed for Caucasian body types. For example, both the conventional MIRD computational phantoms (the Medical Internal
Radiation Dose Committee of the Society of Nuclear Medicine Pamphlet No. 5 type computational phantoms)1 and the newly released voxel computational phantoms by ICRP2 are both based on Caucasian anatomical data. Further, basic data for radiation protection, like dose conversion factors, have been prepared using Caucasian computational phantoms. Therefore, Asian researchers have desired a clari cation of the difference in doses due to the anatomical differences between Caucasian and Asians. Voxel computational phantoms enable us to reasonably investigate the dose differences between these two different races, since they can simulate anatomical structures realistically. From this viewpoint, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) constructed the rst Asian voxel computational phantom called Otoko in 2001,3 and several Japanese computational phantoms have been constructed since then, mainly for radiation protection purposes. Additionally, the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT) has developed Japanese voxel computational phantoms for the evaluation of the exposure to electromagnetic elds, which has become a concern in recent years. At NICT, several advanced computational phantoms, like a variable posture computational phantom and a pregnant computational phantom, have been developed. In this chapter, we introduce these Japanese computational phantoms, and explain their applications to ionizing and nonionizing radiation dosimetry in diverse conditions.
