Dose Calculation

["Sue M. Dupre" <DUPRE%PUCC.bitnet@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>]

Good morning!  I'd like to describe a situation my colleagues and I have been
discussing:

Imagine that a person using an x-ray diffractometer has passed a portion of a
finger through the primary beam. Assume that one is able to determine the ener-
gy deposited and the volume and mass irradiated (using the depth at which 99.9%
of the beam has been absorbed).  If the irradiated mass is considerably less
than 1 gram, is there any reason you wouldn't calculate dose simply by calcula-
ting the following quantity?:

(Energy deposited, in ergs, divided by the irradiated mass, in grams) divided
by 1 rad per 100 ergs/gram

I think this may qualify as a Dumb Question, but we did wonder if there were
subtleties we might have overlooked as we held this discussion.

Sue Dupre/Health Physicist/Princeton University
dupre@princeton.edu