Leaf sequencing is an important step in IMRT treatment planning. A given fluence matrix has to be decomposed into a sum of binary matrices corresponding to fields deliverable with a multileaf collimator. We consider the problem to find such a decomposition with minimal delivery time. It is shown how the network flow formulation from [4] can be modified to take tongue-and-groove underdosage effe...

The aim of this study is to perform a direct comparison of the source model for photon beams with and without flattening filter (FF) and to develop an efficient independent algorithm for planar dose calculation for FF-free (FFF) intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA). The source model consisted of a point source modeling the primary photons and extrafocal bivariate Gauss...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of fluence map editing in electronic tissue compensator (ETC) on the dose homogeneity for head and neck cancer patients. Treatment planning using 6-MV X-rays and bilateral field arrangement employing ETC was carried out on the computed tomography (CT) datasets of 20 patients with head and neck cancer. All the patients were planned in Varian E...

Background: To investigate a method for standardizing intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) optimization for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), in order to reduce the influence of subjective factors. Materials and Methods: This study is based on example IMRT plans for NPC, which were randomly divided into data acquisition and data verification groups. Organs at risk (OARs) were analyzed for...

Intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) has become an effective tool for cancer treatment with radiation. However, even expert radiation planners still need to spend a substantial amount of time manually adjusting IMRT optimization parameters such as dose limits and costlet weights in order to obtain a clinically acceptable plan. In this paper, we describe two main advances that simplify the pa...

Essential for the calculation of photon fluence distributions for intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) is the use of a suitable objective function. The objective function should reflect the clinical aims of tumor control and low side effect probability. Individual radiobiological parameters for patient organs are not yet available with sufficient accuracy. Some of the major drawbacks of some...

We report on the results of optical follow-up observations of the counterpart of GRB 970508, starting 7 hours after the event. Multi-color U, B, V, R c and I c band observations were obtained during the first three consecutive nights. The counterpart was monitored regularly in R c until ∼ 4 months after the burst. The light curve after the maximum follows a decline that can be fitted with a pow...

In patients with pancreatic cancer, intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) under breath holding facilitates concentration of the radiation dose in the tumor, while sparing the neighboring organs at risk and minimizing interplay effects between movement of the multileaf collimator and motion of the internal structures. Although the breath-holding technique provides high interportal reproducibil...