background: in treating patients with radiation, the degree of accuracy for the delivery of tumor dose is recommended to be within ± 5% by icru in report 24. the experimental studies have shown that the presence of low-density inhomogeneity in areas such as the lung can lead to a greater than 30% change in the water dose data. therefore, inhomogeneity corrections should be used in treatment pla...

background: physical wedges are still widely used as beam modifiers in external beam radiotherapy. however the presence of them in the beam trace may cause beam hardening which may not be considered in many treatment planning systems. the aim of this study is to investigate the beam hardening effect generated by physical wedges via different beam quality indexes as photon spectrum, half value l...

The safety and efficacy of carbon-ion radiotherapy for advanced non-small cell lung cancer have not been established. We evaluated the clinical outcomes and dose-volume histogram parameters of carbon-ion radiotherapy compared with photon therapy in T2b-4N0M0 non-small cell lung cancer. Twenty-three patients were treated with carbon-ion radiotherapy between May 2011 and December 2015. Seven, 14,...

background: in radiation therapy, peripheral dose or the dose outside the radiotherapy field, is important when anatomical structures with very low dose tolerances are involved. one of these critical organs in pelvic irradiation is testis. the amount of radiation delivered to the testes in radiotherapy must be kept as small as possible, consistent with the limit dose of this organ. the threshol...

External photon beam radiotherapy is usually carried out with more than one radiation beam in order to achieve a uniform dose distribution inside the target volume and an as low as possible a dose in healthy tissues surrounding the target. ICRU Report No. 50 recommends a target dose uniformity within +7% and –5% of the dose delivered to a well defined prescription point within the target. Moder...

Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) is the standard of care in the treatment of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC) based on level 1 evidence. Technical advances in radiotherapy have revolutionized the treatment of HNSCC, with the most tangible gain being a reduction in long term morbidity. However, these benefits come with a serious and sobering price. Today, there is a greater ...

Introduction: The heavyweight concretes have been widely used for constructing medical or industrial radiation facilities with photon sources. Materials and Methods: In this study, heavy concretes containing galena (PbS) and several borated minerals are proposed as suitable materials against photons. The shielding properties of 21 galena concretes containing seven borated minerals with three m...

BACKGROUND Electron linear accelerators in medical radiotherapy have replaced cobalt and caesium sources of radiation. However, medical accelerators with photon energies over 10 MeV generate undesired fast neutron contamination in a therapeutic X-ray photon beam. Photons with energies above 10 MeV can interact with the atomic nucleus of a high-Z material, of which the target and the head of an ...