Modelling and Monte Carlo organ dose calculations for workers walking on ground contaminated with Cs-137 and Co-60 gamma sources

A pair of walking phantoms was developed from deformable mesh phantoms to represent individuals walking on contaminated ground. The Monte Carlo N-particle extended version code was used to calculate organ doses from ground contamination scenarios involving parallel and isotropic planar sources of Cs-137 and Co-60 with concentrations of 30 kBqm(-2). For the parallel plane source case, the organ doses were up to 78 % greater for walking phantoms than those for the standing phantoms. The dose difference is because the widely open legs during walking provide less shielding to several organs, especially the kidneys, ovaries and liver, from parallel sources. The effective doses of the walking phantoms were on average 15 % higher than the standing phantoms. On the other hand, when isotropic planar sources were considered, no significant dose difference was observed. This study demonstrated the feasibility of using deformable phantoms to represent realistic postures for organ dose calculations in environmental dosimetry studies.