Modeling of beam customization devices in the pencil beam splitting algorithm for heavy charged particle radiotherapy

Abstract

A broad-beam-delivery system for heavy-charged-particle radiotherapy often employs multiple collimators and a range-compensating filter, which potentially offer complex beam customization. In treatment planning, it is however difficult for a conventional pencil-beam algorithm to deal with these structures due to beam-size growth during transport. This study aims to resolve the problem with a novel computational model. The pencil beams are initially defined at the range compensating filter with angular-acceptance correction for the upstream collimators followed by the range compensation effects. They are individually transported with possible splitting near the downstream collimator edges to deal with its fine structure. The dose distribution for a carbon-ion beam was calculated and compared with existing experimental data. The penumbra sizes of various collimator edges agreed between them to a submillimeter level. This beam-customization model will complete an accurate and efficient dose-calculation algorithm for treatment planning with heavy charged particles.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Semi-empirical formulation of multiple scattering for Gaussian beam model of heavy charged particles stopping in tissue-like matter
• Dynamic splitting of Gaussian pencil beams in heterogeneity-correction algorithms for radiotherapy with heavy charged particles
• Computational modeling of beam-customization devices for heavy-charged-particle radiotherapy

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Influence of nuclear interactions in polyethylene range compensators for carbon-ion radiotherapy