An estimation of cost of concrete shielding in a radiotherapy room housing a clinical linear accelerator that produces high-energy photons – Part II

Abstract

High-energy photons produced by large medical linear accelerators are widely used in medicine for the treatment of various types of malignant tumors. In the last decades the use of photon beams in radiation therapy was improved due to the arising of advanced technologies and techniques of treatment such as IMRT (intensity modulated radiation therapy), VMAT (volumetric modulated arc therapy), IGRT (image guided radiotherapy) and SBRT (stereotactic body radiation therapy). However, we should guarantee that the use of these procedures does not increase the radiation doses in the vicinities of the radiotherapy room above the permissible level. In this work we carry out an estimation of cost of concrete shielding for a standard radiotherapy room and for photon energies ranging from 4 to 30 MeV (megaelectron volts), and always considering the constraint of the allowed level of radiation in the vicinity of the room. Results have indicated that total cost of concrete increases about 22-25% when photon energies increase from the minimum to the maximum values analyzed. Results also indicated an overall linear increasing of cost with the area of the treatment room and may support some of the guidelines of radiation protection.