The Dose Assessment Method Based on the Local Method of Characteristics and Skeletal Animation

Flexible and accurate estimation of dose absorbed by critical human organs is important to ensure and improve workers’ radiation safety. Absorbed doses for different organs and tissues are affected by their positions and the orientation of the body in the radiation field. This paper presents a skeletal animated local method of characteristic (SALMOC) dose assessment method that considers the working dynamics and organ-level dose for occupational workers during nuclear facility decommissioning. The proposed method combines the verisimilitude of skeletal animation technology (SA) with the flexibility of the local method of characteristics (LMOC). To account for the working posture, the change in different working postures are controlled by skeletal animation, and then the voxel model in a certain pose is generated according to the changed human model. Finally, the LMOC is used to perform the dose assessment. The proposed SALMOC method not only accounts for different working postures during the decommissioning of nuclear facilities but also considers the occlusion and scattering effect of the human model to achieve accurate organ-level dose assessment. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing the results with those derived from the Monte-Carlo method and Point-Kernel method evaluated on two different organs. The result shows that the proposed method can generate voxel models for irregular organs, and the tests show better consistency with the Monte-Carlo method compared with the Point-Kernel method.