Abstract
Accurate treatment planning in radiotherapy essentially decreases damage to healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. Due to plans to use a direct, highly collimated, narrow beam with high intensity to treat small area tumors, researchers have studied microbeam radiation therapy extensively. Using a synchrotron beam as the radiation source may help to limit damage, but treatment planning using computerized simulations and dosimetry is still necessary to achieve optimal results. For this purpose, PDA-gel dosimeters were developed and their sensitivity around a 150 keV induced synchrotron X-ray radiation beam was examined via Monte Carlo simulations using the EGS5 code system. The microbeam development is now at the animal study stage. In this study, we simulate the irradiation of a rat’s brain. The simulation results obtained spectra for two types of PDA-gel dosimeters that were compared with the spectrum obtained in a modelized brain tumor of a rat. Additionally, percentage depth dose curves were calculated for the brain tissue and the two gels. Correction equations for the dosimeters were obtained from the dose-difference plots. For further references, these equations can be used to calculate the actual dose in a brain tumor in a rat. The Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that PDA-gel dosimeters can be used for treatment planning using synchrotron irradiations.
Highlights
Three-dimensional (3D) dosimetry is increasingly used in radiation therapy because it can expand our knowledge regarding the dose distribution of high-energy radiation in the human body
This study investigated the suitability of PDA-gel dosimeters for clinical references in irradiation via synchrotron beams using the EGS5 Monte Carlo user code, evaluating whether these dosimeters can be used in microbeam radiation therapy (MRT)
The simulations obtained the spectra for the PDA-Phytagel and the PDA-RTV gel dosimeters, and we calculated their percentage depth dose (PDD) curves
Summary
Three-dimensional (3D) dosimetry is increasingly used in radiation therapy because it can expand our knowledge regarding the dose distribution of high-energy radiation in the human body Such information can help improve treatment planning accuracy and decrease the damage to the healthy cells surrounding a tumor. Various polymer gel-type dosimeters are being studied and developed, including the standard polyacrylamide-based dosimeters (PAG, or the commercially available name BANG® ) [2,3]. These dosimeters consist of the co-monomers acrylamide and N,N’-methylene-bis-acrylamide (Bis) dispersed in an aqueous gelatin matrix. Diacetylenes embedded in a water-equivalent gel matrix can show the dose distribution in 3D as an equivalent for soft-tissue materials
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