RADAR - Available Phantoms

You want phantoms, we got phantoms. Currently, an entire new generation of human body models is being developed. We are moving from our older models that looked like this.....:

to cool new ones that look like this.....:

Fetus don't fail me now.....

OK, this did well for some time in calculating doses to adults, but in nuclear medicine as well as other applications we quickly found the need for phantoms representing other people. In 1987, Cristy and Eckerman published a very important work in which they described six phantoms representing children and adults. These six phantoms were designated as a Newborn, One-Year-Old, Five-Year-Old, Ten-Year-Old, Fifteen-Year-Old and an Adult. The adult was very similar to the Fisher-Snyder phantom, but had some minor modifications, and included some organs that the Fisher-Snyder phantom did not. All of the phantoms had both male and female organs. The age designations were meant to be approximate - Cristy and Eckerman researched the changes of organ size, position, and composition with age and, like the Reference Man document, catalogued what they felt were the appropriate values to use as averages for that age. Of course some children grow faster or slower than others - one can envision a 5-yr-old who is as big as the 10-yr-old phantom; in this case, the 10-yr-old phantom should probably be used, as what we are after is energy absorbed per unit mass (dose), and the important issue is probably mass. In any case, the idea was to give a set of phantoms that would span the size of people from infancy to adultery, I mean adulthood, and which could be used to calculate dose estimates for a range of people of different sizes.

By this point in our presentation about half of you are probably upset, because we are not giving enough consideration to the stronger sex. Women were somewhat slighted in all of this, as they were slighted in the workplace for so long. Although the Fisher-Snyder and Cristy-Eckerman phantoms had female organs, they were pretty much built around the average male for that age. The Cristy-Eckerman 15-year-old phantom was used for many years as a surrogate for an adult female, but who wants to have a surrogate representative? In 1995, Stabin and colleagues put out a document similar to the Cristy-Eckerman document, but with a series of 4 phantoms representing the adult female - the first was just a standard adult female (with several notable differences from the Cristy-Eckerman 15-year-old phantom) and the other three represented the woman at various stages of gestation, as dose to the fetus is such an important issue in both nuclear medicine and other areas.

So as of this date, one could argue, we have a more or less complete ‘family’ of phantoms - just like a real household - kids running around screaming, dad sitting there doing nothing, several pregnant women (all right, a strange household perhaps, but is yours, like, perfectly normal?). If you want to see the SAFs for any phantom, you can check them out them here: