A simple facility for wholebody irradiation.

Abstract

excerpt Recent interest in whole-body irradiation of human beings, for example prior to bone marrow transplantation in cases of acute leukemia, has led to studies of suitable facilities to provide uniform dosage (1). While ideally it would seem best to irradiate the whole body at once, patient comfort, length of time of irradiation, and economy of space and equipment must be considered. Methods that have been used or proposed include treatment at a long source-skin distance (SSD) to obtain a sufficiently large field, with or without the patient curled into a small space (2,3), and the use of as many as eight Co60 sources of comparatively low strengths (4). These methods have the disadvantage of requiring a large space devoted specifically to this purpose and generally involving a long irradiation time. There would appear to be little objection to the use of a moving-field technique as long as the treatment time were not unduly protracted. This paper describes such a technique allowing a uniform high dosag...