A specially designed high resolution converging collimator having a focal length of 50 cm has been evaluated for cone beam single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). The focal region was investigated by imaging a point source placed at the expected focal point and along the central ray of the collimator in front of and behind the focal point. Technetium-99m point source sensitivities m...

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine Task Group 36 (AAPM TG-36) data can be used to estimate peripheral dose (PD) distributions outside the primary radiation field. However, the report data does not apply to linear accelerators equipped with a multileaf collimator (MLC) and universal wedge (UW). Tertiary multileaf collimators have been shown to significantly affect PD distribution...

The objective of this work is to quantify the systematic errors introduced by the common assumption of invariant secondary electron spectra with changing field sizes, as relevant to stereotactic radiotherapy and other treatment modes incorporating small beam segments delivered with a linac-based stereotactic unit. The EGSnrc/BEAMnrc Monte Carlo radiation transport code was used to construct a d...

This study evaluates changes in the dosimetric characteristics of a Varian Millennium 80-leaf multileaf collimator (MLC) in a radiation field. In this study, dose rate, scatter factor, percentage depth dose, surface dose and dose in the buildup region, beam profile, flatness and symmetry, and penumbra width measurements were made for 6-MV and 15-MV photon beams. Analysis of widths between 50% d...

OBJECTIVE To determine accurately the relative output factors, defined as the ratio of the nominal dose rate for a given collimator to that of the 60-mm collimator. This is particularly important for radiosurgical treatment of functional disorders, such as trigeminal neuralgia, in which a single large radiation dose is delivered to the target with a small collimator, such as the 5-mm collimator...

Biological tissues exhibit elastic x-ray scatter properties unique to individual tissue types. It has been suggested that these properties could be exploited in the discrimination of tissues in diagnostic radiology, particularly in mammographic imaging. The work in this thesis investigates the elastic scatter from human breast tissues with a view to moving the Diffraction Enhanced Breast Imagin...

transition matrix in 3D Electronically Collimated SPECT Anne C. Sauve1, Alfred O. Hero1, W. Leslie Rogers2 and Neal H. Clinthorne2 January 15, 1997 Abstract In this paper we will present numerical studies of the performance of a 3D Compton camera being developed at the University of Michigan. We present a physical model of the camera which exploits symmetries and an adapted spatial sampling pat...

UNLABELLED We investigated the impact of the quantitation and reconstruction protocol on clinical tasks. The performance of standard clinical reconstruction procedures in discrimination tasks related to the diagnosis of prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD) was compared with the performance of a quantitative approach incorporating improved corrections for scatter, attenuation, intrinsic spatial re...