PROTON DOSE CALCULATIONS IN HOMOGENEOUS MEDIA A Thesis

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In order to complete this study, a substantial amount of background theory beyond the traditional Medical Physics curriculum was necessary. I am grateful to Dr. Kenneth Hogstrom for providing additional instruction in these areas and recognize that I am fortunate to have learned this material from a prominent expert in this field. I also owe a large debt of gratitude to my very patient and dedicated advisor, Dr. Jonas Fontenot. His expert guidance has been very helpful in improving my technical writing, research and presentation skills, data analysis, and problem solving. I would also like to thank Dr. Fontenot for his guidance in issues outside of academics and for his understanding during difficult times. I greatly appreciate the time that my advisory committee (Drs. Blackmon) devoted towards my project. I have benefitted from their wisdom and experience in the field, constructive criticism and helpful comments, and willingness to provide direction. In addition, I am grateful to the late Dr. George Ciangaru for devoting time to corresponding with me and for his recommendations concerning Moliere scatter theory. Further, I thank Dr. Bernard Gottschalk (Harvard University) for the FORTRAN code that he provided freely on his website I am thankful to my fellow students, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center (MBPCC) faculty, and post-doctoral fellows for their readiness to discuss my research project and their helpful insights. I especially thank Mr. David Perrin for helping me develop a preliminary electron dose calculation algorithm. I also am grateful to Mr. Gordon Mancuso for providing his distance-to-agreement MATLAB routine, which served as the framework for the distance-to-agreement routine written for this project. The daily research discussions that I shared with Dr. Robert Carver and Mr. James Kavanaugh have also been helpful, and I feel that we all have advanced our own understanding of our projects by discussing them. I also would like to thank Mr. iii Michael Thomas, software engineer at MBPCC, for his hard work and quick turnaround time on converting the pencil beam code from MATLAB to the C language. I am grateful for the Medical Physics instruction that has served as a solid basis for my thesis work. I owe much gratitude to Drs. Price and all of those that have provided clinical instruction at MBPCC. The administrative staffs, both at Louisiana State University (LSU) and MBPCC, also deserve recognition for their hard work. I acknowledge my entire family for …