Intensity Modulated Therapy for Patients With Breast Cancer. Practical Guidelines and Tips for an Effective Treatment Planning Strategy.

Purpose: Practical guidelines and tips for effective and robust radiation therapy treatment planning for patients with breast cancer are addressed for fixed-field intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) or volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) techniques. The concepts described here are general and valid on all treatment planning systems. However, some details shown here have been applied to the Varian platforms used at the authors' institutions.

Development of a universal medical X-ray imaging phantom prototype.

Diagnostic X-ray imaging depends on the maintenance of image quality that allows for proper diagnosis of medical conditions. Maintenance of image quality requires quality assurance programs on the various X-ray modalities, which consist of pro-jection radiography (including mobile X-ray units), fluoroscopy, mammography, and computed tomography (CT) scanning. Currently a variety of modality-specific phantoms are used to perform quality assurance (QA) tests.

In-house development of a neonatal chest simulation phantom.

The aim of the study was to design and construct an anatomical and radiological phantom of a neonatal chest for investigating image quality and patient entrance surface dose (ESD). The density, elemental composition, scatter, attenuation, and absorption characteristics of different possible substitute materials were compared to that of neonatal tissues for radiological equivalence. Availability and cost of possible substitute materials were also considered.