After many years of development, proton therapy is finally reaching the point of mass adoption in clinical practice. Advances in particle accelerator technology and improved dose delivery techniques have provided strong driving forces for expanded use. Pencil beam scanning (PBS) is the generic name for radiation dose delivery to a target volume using individually controlled small pencil beams o...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE For several years three-dimensional treatment-planning systems have used pencil beam algorithms in the calculation of electron fields. Nowadays, exact Monte Carlo methods are commercially available, showing good correspondence to experimental results. Clinical examples are investigated to find differences in the dose distribution of treatment plans, which are calculated w...

background: inclusion of inhomogeneity corrections in intensity modulated small fields always makes conformal irradiation of lung tumor very complicated in accurate dose delivery. objective: in the present study, the performance of five algorithms via monte carlo, pencil beam, convolution, fast superposition and superposition were evaluated in lung cancer intensity modulated radiotherapy planni...

Background: Recent studies in eye plaque brachytherapy have shown a considerable difference between the dosimetric results using water phantom and a model of human eye containing realistic materials. In spite of this fact, there is a lack of simulation studies based on such a model in proton therapy literatures. In the presented work, the effect of utilizing an eye model with ocular media on pr...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE New treatment techniques in radiotherapy employ increasing dose calculation complexity in treatment planning. For an adequate check of the results coming from a modern treatment planning system, clinical tools with almost the same degree of generality and accuracy as the planning system itself are needed. To fulfil this need we propose a photon pencil kernel parameterizat...

Proton, as well as other ion, beams applied by electro-magnetic deflection in pencil-beam scanning (PBS) are minimally perturbed and thus can be quantified a priori by their fundamental interactions in a medium. This a priori quantification permits an optimal reduction of characterizing measurements on a particular PBS delivery system. The combination of a priori quantification and measurements...