Impact of rare earth element added filters on the X-ray beam spectra: A Monte Carlo approach

Abstract

The effectiveness of added filters including conventional and rare earth materials for dental radiography tasks was investigated using a simulation approach. Current study focuses on the combination of a range of various filters to investigate the reduction of radiation absorbed dose and improving the quality of a radiography image.To simulate the X-ray beam spectrum, a MCNP5 code was applied. Relative intensity, beam quality, and mean energy were investigated for a typical dental radiography machine. The impact of different rare-earth materials with different thicknesses and tube voltages on the X-ray spectrum was investigated.For Aluminum as a conventional filter, the modeled X-ray spectra and HVL values were in a good agreement with those reported by IPEM. The results showed that for a 70 kVp voltage, with an increase of the thickness and atomic number of a given added filters, an increase of HVL values were observed. However, with the increase of the attenuator thickness, X-ray beam intensity decreases. For mean energy, different results were observed. It was also found that rare earth made filters reduce high energy X-ray radiation due to k-edge absorption.This leads to an ideal beam for intra-oral radiography tasks. However, as a disadvantage of rare earth added filters, the reduction of the tube output levels should also be considered. A. Eskandarlou et al. / Impact of rare earth element filters on the X-ray spectra

Monte Carlo simulation study of rare earth/polypropylene composite shielding 120 KV medical X-ray

“…Monte Carlo simulation has been widely used in the field of radiation protection in recent years [6][7][8] . The purpose of Monte Carlo simulation is to create a random sampling model for a given problem and then simulate the particle transport process by tracking the particle history with a large number of random numbers.…”