A formulation of tissue- and water-equivalent materials using the stoichiometric analysis method for CT-number calibration in radiotherapy treatment planning

Abstract

Tissue- and water-equivalent materials (TEMs) are widely used in quality assurance and calibration procedures, both in radiodiagnostics and radiotherapy. In radiotherapy, particularly, the TEMs are often used for computed tomography (CT) number calibration in treatment planning systems. However, currently available TEMs may not be very accurate in the determination of the calibration curves due to their limitation in mimicking radiation characteristics of the corresponding real tissues in both low- and high-energy ranges. Therefore, we are proposing a new formulation of TEMs using a stoichiometric analysis method to obtain TEMs for the calibration purposes. We combined the stoichiometric calibration and the basic data method to compose base materials to develop TEMs matching standard real tissues from ICRU Report 44 and 46. First, the CT numbers of six materials with known elemental compositions were measured to get constants for the stoichiometric calibration. The results of the stoichiometric calibration were used together with the basic data method to formulate new TEMs. These new TEMs were scanned to validate their CT numbers. The electron density and the stopping power calibration curves were also generated. The absolute differences of the measured CT numbers of the new TEMs were less than 4 HU for the soft tissues and less than 22 HU for the bone compared to the ICRU real tissues. Furthermore, the calculated relative electron density and electron and proton stopping powers of the new TEMs differed by less than 2% from the corresponding ICRU real tissues. The new TEMs which were formulated using the proposed technique increase the simplicity of the calibration process and preserve the accuracy of the stoichiometric calibration simultaneously.