Investigation and Application of High Megavoltage X-Ray Imaging Mode in Radiotherapy

Abstract

After drawbacks and shortages of using conventional kV or MV imaging mode were analyzed, this study proposes a new position verification mode with using the energy larger than 15 MeV or nominal accelerating potential greater than 25 MV X-Ray. The new position verification mode is named HMV imaging mode. Along with the comparison of theoretical analyses, phantom experiments and clinical results to the original imaging modes, this report is going to demonstrate the HMV imaging mode is superior to traditional kV and MV imaging modes. This report first theoretically analyzed three main effects of X-ray interacting with medium by numerous equations and compared their mass attenuation coefficient with different types of tissue. X-ray irradiated on a “Catphan 500” cylinder phantom with different energies to verify these theoretical results. Furthermore, based on phantom experiments’ results, we have done numerous clinical trials and comparisons with patient’s clinical results. The theoretical and experimental results illustrate that the scanned images from HMV mode have a good quality and have ability to identify different tissue components clearly. HMV imaging mode overcomes drawbacks of position verification from both kV and MV level imaging mode as well as keeping advantages of kV and MV imaging mode. The result indicates that HMV is a good position verification mode in radiotherapy.