Author: Michael B. Altman, Zhuo Chen, Ella Lawrence, Borna Maraghechi, Ziad H. Saleh 👨🔬
Affiliation: Washington University School of Medicine, WashU Medicine 🌍
Purpose: Structural shielding design for x-ray facilities, as specified in NCRP Report No. 151, is a detailed process but an important component of Medical Physics graduate and post-graduate education. Blender 3D, an open-source computer graphics and animation software, was utilized in a classroom project by Medical Physics students as a tool to enhance their intuitive understanding of shielding design and analysis of a radiation treatment vault.
Methods: A 2D floor plan of a treatment facility was imported into the Blender software to construct a 3D scaled model of the vault. A custom Python script was developed, using the integrated scripting environment within Blender, to create a graphical user interface for input parameters (workload, occupancy, use factors, etc.) and to implement the shielding equations specified in NCRP Report No. 151. Students performed calculations in the Blender 3D environment and their results were benchmarked against the vault’s shielding report.
Results: Students were able to extract measurements from isocenter to several points of interest behind the primary and secondary barriers within the virtual environment using the built-in tools and manipulate various parameters using the graphical user interface. The calculation results including barrier transmission, and shielding design goals matched the results of the formal shielding report showing students were able to provide an accurate evaluation of the vault’s shielding compliance with a fairly shallow learning curve.
Conclusion: Blender 3D offers a comprehensive environment for shielding design and evaluation through its 3D visualization and simulation tools. Furthermore, its 3D visualization and scripting capabilities allows for more customizable and detailed analysis of the vault’s structure compared to traditional methods (Excel, etc..). The tool could be extended to build shielding design models for other x-ray facilities (CT, HDR, etc) and facilitate the distribution of these models through Github to be used by the broader educational community.