Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is used for external-beam radiation therapy setup and target localization. As with all medical applications of ionizing radiation, radiation exposure should be managed safely and optimized to achieve the necessary image quality using the lowest possible dose. The present study investigates doses from standard kilovoltage kV radiographic and CBCT imaging prot...

Bone, air passages, cavities, and lung are elements present in patients, but challenging to properly correct for in treatment planning dose calculations. Plastic scintillator detectors (PSDs) have proven to be well suited for dosimetry in non-reference conditions such as small fields. The objective of this study was to investigate the performance of a commercial treatment planning system (TPS) ...

In this paper, we present a novel implementation of a dose calculation application, based on the GEANT4 Monte Carlo toolkit. Validation studies were performed with an homogeneous water phantom and an Alderson-Rando anthropomorphic phantom both irradiated with high-energy photon beams produced by a clinical linear accelerator. As input, this tool requires computer tomography images for automatic...

Most of the treatment units, both new and old models, are equipped with a megavoltage portal imager but its use for volumetric imaging is limited. This is mainly due to the poor image quality produced by the high-energy treatment beam (> 6MV). A linac at our center is equipped with a prototype 2.5 MV imaging beam. This study evaluates the feasibility of low-dose megavoltage cone-beam imaging wi...

Background: The purpose of this study is to fabricate inexpensive in-house low cost homogeneous and heterogeneous human equivalent thorax phantom and assess the dose accuracy of the Treatment Planning Systems (TPS) calculated values for different lung treatment dosimetery. It is compared with Thermoluminescent Dosimeter (TLD) measurement. Materials and Methods: Homogeneous and heterogeneous tho...

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...

*Corresponding author: Dr. Asghar Mesbahi, Medical Physics Department, Medical School, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran. Fax: +98 411 3364660 Email: [email protected] Background: Prediction of the absorbed dose in irradiated volume plays an important role in the outcome of radiotherapy. Application of small fields for radiotherapy of thorax makes the dose calculation pr...

PURPOSE To compare measured and calculated doses using Pencil Beam (PB) and Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm on a CIRS thorax phantom for SBRT lung treatments. METHODS A 6MV photon beam generated by a Primus linac with an Optifocus MLC (Siemens) was used. Dose calculation was done using iPlan v4.1.2 TPS (BrainLAB) by PB and MC (dose to water and dose to medium) algorithms. The commissioning of both...