| Abstract: Patient dosimetry is compulsory in any field of medical physics involving ionizing radiation (radiodiagnosis, radiotherapy, nuclear medicine and health physics). However, in vivo dosimetry is rarely possible and must be often doubled by measurements and/or calculations. When measurements on patients are impossible, phantoms made by tissue-equivalent materials are used. These human body substitutes are called physical phantoms and can be a simple combination of spheres and cylinders or more complicated anthropomorphic phantoms. Furthermore, calculation of organ doses are usually performed on such called mathematical or virtual phantoms (stylized or voxelized). A lot of physical and virtual phantoms have been developed over the time and their applications are countless. The purpose of this work, organized as short review, is to present the most popular patient phantoms used in nuclear medicine and radiotherapy. As an example, some original results obtained using VMC (Visual Monte Carlo) code are presented and discussed. |
