Monte Carlo simulation of the Varian Clinac 600C accelerator dynamic and physical wedges

Abstract

The present paper describes the study done on the dosimetric characteristics of the Varian Clinac 600C dynamic wedges (DW) and their comparison with the physical wedges (PW) in terms of the differences affecting the dose distributions, beam spectra, energy fluence and angular distributions. The geometry of the 4 MV photon beam and the dose distributions in a water phantom were simulated with GEANT3 and DPM Monte Carlo code systems. The DW was modelled through the constant movement of the upper jaws. The depth dose distributions and lateral profiles for the DW, PW and open fields were measured and compared with the Monte Carlo simulations and the global agreement was found to be within 3%. It was also found that the effects of a DW on beam spectral and angular distributions are much less significant than those produced by a PW. For example, in our study we found out that the 45°PW, when compared with the corresponding open field, can introduce a 30% increase in the mean photon energy due to the beam hardening effect and that it can also introduce a 4.5% dose reduction in the build-up region because of the reduction of the contaminated electrons by the PW. For the DW neither this mean-energy increase nor such dose reduction was found. The PW, when compared to the DW, significantly alters the photon-beam spectrum and these dosimetric differences are significant and further investigation must be performed to quantify the impact in clinical use of these beams.