After amputation many people experience vivid sensations of the body part they have lost. These “sensory ghosts” can arise within hours of the loss of the limb and are often painful. Such phenomena have been a mysterious part of medical lore for over a century, but recent research suggests that phantoms can teach us substantial lessons about the organisation and plasticity of the brain. We stan...

8 Theorists calculate that this drastic change in the structure of matter sets in over a narrow range of temperatures centred around 10 12 K. To gauge the change, it is instructive to compare the degrees of freedom — the number of different particles that energy can go to. On the hadronic side of the transition, the important particles at these temperatures are just the pions (the other hadrons...

BACKGROUND Trends in interventional radiology and urology training are orientated towards reducing costs and increasing efficiency. In order to comply with the trends, we propose training on inexpensive patient-specific kidney phantoms. PURPOSE To develop a new kidney phantom for puncture and drainage training in interventional urology and radiology, and to evaluate their anatomical correctne...

Ultrasound phantoms are invaluable as training tools for vascular access procedures. We developed ultrasound phantoms with wall-less vessels using 3-dimensional printed chambers. Agar was used as a soft tissue-mimicking material, and the wall-less vessels were created with rods that were retracted after the agar was set. The chambers had integrated luer connectors to allow for fluid injections ...

The use of Cone beam CT (CBCT) systems for Image Guided Radiotherapy is rapidly expanding in the developed world. With its use comes concern for the increased risks of additional radiation exposure. Quantification of the imaging dose is necessary in order to report, optimise and justify CBCT exposures. This article reviews the current methods of dose measurement and calculation including dose m...

introduction after the publication of task group number 43 dose calculation formalism by the american association of physicists in medicine (aapm), this method has been known as the most common dose calculation method in brachytherapy treatment planning. in this formalism, the water phantom is introduced as the reference dosimetry phantom, while the attenuation coefficient of the sources in the...

PURPOSE To investigate beam quality correction, KQQ0 (r) and phantom scatter correction, Kphan (r) for lithium formate dosimeter as a function of distance r along the transverse axis of the high-energy brachytherapy sources 60Co, 137Cs, 192Ir and 169Yb using the Monte Carlo-based EGSnrc code system. MATERIALS AND METHODS The brachytherapy sources investigated in this study are BEBIG High Dose...

The purpose of this study is to validate Eclipse's electron Monte Carlo algorithm (eMC) in heterogeneous phantoms using radiochromic films and EGSnrc as a reference Monte Carlo algorithm. Four heterogeneous phantoms are used in this study. Radiochromic films are inserted in these phantoms, including in heterogeneous media, and the measured relative dose distributions are compared to eMC calcula...

In treatment planning of brachytherapy, absorbed dose is calculated by superposing predetermined distributions of absorbed dose to water in water for the single source according to the irradiation pattern ͓i.e., placement of the source͑s͒ or dwelling position͑s͔͒. Single-source reference water data are derived from Monte Carlo ͑MC͒ simulations and/or experiments. For reasons of positional accuracy, exp...

Physical anthropomorphic phantoms have been utilized for a variety of dosimet- ric studies across a range of procedures utilizing diagnostic imaging equipment. Unfortunately, these phantoms are often limited to a single reference size, which often may not be representative of the patient population at large. This work set out to develop an adipose tissue-equivalent substitute material that coul...