Preliminary studies on neutron conversion coefficients calculated with MCNPX in NORMAN voxel phantom.

Effective dose is the main radiation protection quantity. Progresses in radiation studies brought ICRP to revise ICRP 60 recommendations. A new publication, already circulated in form of draft, is expected to change some aspects of effective dose evaluation method. The organ absorbed doses for neutrons at various energies and incidence angles, necessary to estimate the effective dose, have been published in ICRU 57 and ICRP 74 reports for ADAM and EVA analytical male and female phantoms and similar calculations were also performed, based on the MCNP code, for VIP-MAN voxel phantom. The NORMAN voxel phantom, developed on the basis of magnetic resonance data of an adult male at HPA (formerly NRPB), is an accurate model (with a voxel element of approximately 8 mm(3)), which well approximates the standard man and has been already employed for radiation protection studies with photons. In the present paper, a modified version, called NORMAN-05, including a new organ, the salivary glands (as suggested in the mentioned ICRP draft), and a more detailed skeletal description, especially devoted to red bone marrow dose evaluation, has been employed with the Monte Carlo code MCNPX to calculate neutron conversion coefficients from thermal energies to 20 MeV. Some preliminary results, for antero-posterior and postero-anterior irradiation conditions, are presented and compared with the available published data.