Pulse and energy pulse height tally comparison in breast dosimetry with Monte Carlo radiation transport codes: MCNP5 and PENEASY(2005)

The authors present a review of tallying processes with non-Boltzmann tallies under Monte Carlo simulations. A comparison between different pulse and energy pulse height tallies has been done with MCNP5 code and PENEASY, a user-friendly version of PENELOPE code. Several simulations have been done for estimating the pulse and energy deposited spectra in a polymethyl-methacrilate (PMMA) phantom used during quality control testing in digital mammography. In the case of MCNP5, the arbitrary energy-loss which is activated by default for particles just crossing the detector has been removed for comparing the efficiency of the tally. PENEASY works similarly, counting all scores which have or have not deposited energy in the phantom. A correction has been done to the code to remove this scoring. As derived from the results, the deposited energy has been estimated as 3.73369e-3 MEv/particle for MCNP5 and 3.25468e-3 MeV/particle for PENASY. Further studies are necessary to obtain more accurate results modeling the compression plate and the imaging system. Pulse and energy which pulse height spectra are still tallies under development and all effort must be done to understand the tallying process under different applications