Introduction Polymer gel dosimeters offer a practical solution to 3D dose verification for conventional radiotherapy as well as intensity-modulated and stereotactic radiotherapy. In this study, EGSnrc calculated and PAGAT polymer gel dosimeter measured dose profiles from single shot irradiation with 18 mm collimator of Gamma Knife in homogeneous and inhomogeneous phantoms were compared with eac...

Background: The purpose of this study was to assess the dose distribution and coverage of level Ⅰ-Ⅱ axillary lymph nodes during whole breast tangential field radiotherapy (RT) after breast-conserving surgery in patients with breast cancer. Materials and Methods: The level Ⅰ-Ⅱ axillary lymph node volumes were retrospectively contoured by a single radiation oncologist based on computed tomography...

The recent development of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) allows the dose distribution to be tailored to match the tumour's shape and position, avoiding damage to healthy tissue to a greater extent than previously possible. Traditional treatment plans assume that the target structure remains in a fixed location throughout treatment. However, many studies have shown that because of ...

The quantitative comparison of two-dimensional dose distributions (e.g., calculated versus measured) has become a key issue in intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) QA. We proposed a new evaluation method referred to as modified dose difference (MDdiff) evaluation. Hereinafter, features and effectiveness of the MDdiff evaluation method will be described. In this work, the formalism of MDdiff ...

Highly attenuating radiation treatment couches are no longer useful in the present era of radiotherapy utilizing IMRT and IGRT. Carbon fibers couch tops with its high tensile strength and low density present a useful alternative. The objective of the current study was to quantify the attenuation of megavoltage photons through a Brainlab imaging couch top and headrest at various angles and field...

We consider Pareto surface based multi-criteria optimization for step and shoot IMRT planning. By analyzing two navigation algorithms, we show both theoretically and in practice that the number of plans needed to form convex combinations of plans during navigation can be kept small (much less than the theoretical maximum number needed in general, which is equal to the number of objectives for o...

Copyright: ß 2014 The PLOS ONE Staff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

abstract 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 po...

PURPOSE Radiotherapy of the neck is known to cause carotid artery stenosis. We compared the carotid artery dose received between volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) and conventional fixed-field intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) plans in patients with early glottic cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty-one early glottic cancer patients who previously underwent definitive radiotherapy ...

Extraskeletal chondrosarcoma of the leg is a rare, malignant neoplasm with very few cases having been reported in the literature. In this study we investigate the possibility of using intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for this type of disease and demonstrate its advantages over conventional three-dimensional (3D) conformal treatment. A case was presented of a patient with extraskeletal ch...