Patient-specific organ dose estimation during transcatheter arterial embolization using Monte Carlo method and adaptive organ segmentation

The purpose of this study was to evaluate organ doses for individual patients undergoing interventional transcatheter arterial embolization (TAE) for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) using measurement-based Monte Carlo simulation and adaptive organ segmentation. Five patients were enrolled in this study after institutional ethical approval and informed consent. Gafchromic XR-RV3 films were used to measure entrance surface dose to reconstruct the nonuniform fluence distribution field as the input data in the Monte Carlo simulation. XR-RV3 films were used to measure entrance surface doses due to their lower energy dependence compared with that of XR-RV2 films. To calculate organ doses, each patient's three-dimensional dose distribution was incorporated into CT DICOM images with image segmentation using thresholding and k-means clustering. Organ doses for all patients were estimated. Our dose evaluation system not only evaluated entrance surface doses based on measurements, but also evaluated the 3D dose distribution within patients using simulations. When film measurements were unavailable, the peak skin dose (between 0.68 and 0.82 of a fraction of the cumulative dose) can be calculated from the cumulative dose obtained from TAE dose reports. Successful implementation of this dose evaluation system will aid radiologists and technologists in determining the actual dose distributions within patients undergoing TAE.