Treating shallow tumors with a homogeneous dose while simultaneously minimizing the dose to distal critical organs remains a challenge in radiotherapy. One promising approach is modulated electron radiotherapy (MERT). Due to the scattering properties of electron beams, the commercially provided secondary and tertiary photon collimation systems are not conducive for electron beam delivery when s...

PURPOSE Through the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of 6 and 10 MV flattening-filter-free (FFF) beams from Varian TrueBeam accelerator, this study aims to find the best incident electron distribution for further studying the small field characteristics of these beams. METHODS By incorporating the training materials of Varian on the geometry and material parameters of TrueBeam Linac head, the 6 an...

A commercial Monte Carlo simulation package, NXEGS 1.12 (NumeriX LLC, New York, NY), was commissioned for photon-beam dose calculations. The same sets of measured data from 6-MV and 18-MV beams were used to commission NXEGS and Pinnacle 6.2b (Philips Medical Systems, Andover, MA). Accuracy and efficiency were compared against the collapsed cone convolution algorithm implemented in Pinnacle 6.2b...

IMRT QA requires, among other tests, a time-consuming process of measuring the absorbed dose, at least to a point, in a high-dose, low-dose-gradient region. Some clinics use a technique of measuring this dose with all beams delivered at a single gantry angle (collapsed delivery), as opposed to the beams delivered at the planned gantry angle (rotated delivery). We examined, established, and opti...

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...

MRI is often used in tumor localization for radiotherapy treatment planning, with gadolinium (Gd)-containing materials often introduced as a contrast agent. Motexafin gadolinium is a novel radiosensitizer currently being studied in clinical trials. The nanoparticle technologies can target tumors with high concentration of high-Z materials. This Monte Carlo study is the first detailed quantitati...

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...

background: small photon fields are increasingly used in modern radiotherapy especially in intensity modulated radiation therapy (imrt) and stereotactic radiosurgery (srs) treatments. accurate beam profile and central axis depth doses measurements of such beams are complicated due to the electron disequilibrium. hence the ebt2 (external beam therapy) gafchromic film was used for dosimetry of sm...

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...