New PhD Thesis defense at the IONHE group

The thesis has been developed at the Institute of Energy Technologies of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya within the framework of the European project "Implications of Medical Low Dose Radiation Exposure" (MEDIRAD). Interventional radiology procedures are associated with potentially high radiation doses to the skin that can produce skin damage to patients. The main objective of the thesis is to develop PyMCGPU-IR, a new software tool based on the Monte Carlo program MC-GPU for assessing skin dose and organ doses in patients undergoing an interventional radiology (IR) procedure, to prevent skin injuries.

PyMCGPU-IR has been validated through skin and organ dose measurements in an anthropomorphic phantom and showed differences below 6% in skin dose measurements and mostly below 20% in organ doses in clinical procedures. PyMCGPU-IR allows, in less than two minutes, the calculation of dose values at specific positions and organs, the dose distribution and the location of the maximum dose per organ. In addition, PyMCGPU-IR overcomes the time limitations of CPU-based MC codes.

In this thesis it has been shown that PyMCGPU-IR is an innovative Skin Dose Calculation (SDC) tool that offers higher performance and accuracy for skin dose calculations compared to most available SDCs. Currently, PyMCGPU-IR provides dose values only after the procedure has finished. In the future, PyMCGPU-IR could be adapted to provide real-time dose calculation if real-time radiation source information is available.