Introduction: Polymer gels are modern dosimeters providing three dimensional dose distributions. These dosimeters can be used in brachytherapy in which the tumor dimension is relatively small and the dose gradient is high. In this study, the ability of the MAGICA polymer gel was investigated for assessing the absolute dose values as well as the dose distribution of low dose rate (LDR) Ir-192 wi...

Introduction: Secondary radiation such as photoelectrons, Auger electrons and characteristic radiations cause a local boost in dose for a tumor when irradiated with an external X-ray beam after being loaded with elements capable of activating the tumor, e.g.; I and Gd. Materials and Methods:  In this investigation, the MCNPX code was used for simulation and calculation of dose enhancement facto...

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to build homogeneous equivalent phantom chest in order to provide the necessary ability for checking the image quality in radiographic tests in four age groups of children in terms of the most recent age group categorization ICRP103. This phantom provides the features of weakness and discrepancies similar to body and can be consi...

Background: Adjacent treatment fields are commonly used in external beam radiation therapy, such as mantle and inverted-Y fields for the treatment of Hodgkin’s disease and craniospinal fields used in the treatment of medulloblastoma and head and neck tumors when the lateral neck fields are placed adjacent to the anterior supraclavicular field. In each of these situations, there is a possibility...

Introduction: Brachytherapy is one type of internal radiation therapy where radiation sources, which are usually encapsulated, are placed as close as possible to the tumor site or inside the patient's body. In this technique, it is important to determine dose distribution around the brachytherapy capsule to create optimal treatment plant. In this way, dosimetric parameters are...

The purpose of this study was to show that the nominal peak tube voltage potential (kVp) and measured half-value layer (HVL) can be used to generate energy spectra and fluence profiles for characterizing a computed tomography (CT) X-ray source, and to validate the source model and an in-house kV X-ray dose computation algorithm (kVDoseCalc) for computing machine- and patient-specific CT dose. S...

PURPOSE To investigate effects of metal artifacts on the dose calculation accuracy of three dose calculation algorithms on CT and cone-beam CT images. METHODS A phantom with and without metal objects was scanned using CT simulator and on-board kV CBCT. Conformal 5-field treatment plans with identical physical and dosimetric parameters were created in the Eclipse™ treatment planning system for...

Recent developments in radiation therapy have been focused on applications of charged particles, especially—protons. Proton therapy can allow higher dose conformality compared to conventional radiation therapy. Dose calculations have an integral role in the successful application of proton therapy. Over the years several dose calculation methods have been proposed in proton therapy. A common ch...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the dose differences introduced by the TMR 10 and the convolution dose calculation algorithms in GammaPlan version 10, as compared to the TMR classic algorithm in the previous versions of GammaPlan. Computed axial tomographic images of a polystyrene phantom and a human head were acquired using a GE LightSpeed VCT scanner. A treatment target with a presc...