Dosimetric effects caused by couch tops and immobilization devices: report of AAPM Task Group 176.

The dosimetric impact from devices external to the patient is a complex combination of increased skin dose, reduced tumor dose, and altered dose distribution. Although small monitor unit or dose corrections are routinely made for blocking trays, ion chamber correction factors, e.g.

Two self-referencing methods for the measurement of beam spot position.

Purpose: Two quantitative methods of measuring electron beam spot position with respect to the collimator axis of rotation (CAOR) are described.

Methods: Method 1 uses a cylindrical ion chamber (IC) mounted on a jig corotational with the collimator making the relationship among the chamber, jaws, and CAOR fixed and independent of collimator angle. A jaw parallel to the IC axis is set to zero and the IC position adjusted so that the IC signal is approximately 50% of the open field value, providing a large dose gradient in the region of the IC.

Poster - Thur Eve - 32: Water tank referenced calibration method for detector array devices.

Introduction: Detector array devices, such as the I'mRT Matrixx (IBA Dosimetry), provide a means of evaluating beam profiles with respect to gantry for a range of dose rates and monitor units. The relative calibration of these devices is typically highly susceptible to even relatively small variations in beam output. An alternative method is proposed here, which directly references the device detector response to water tank data.

Sci-Fri PM: Delivery - 06: A generalized solution to the wide field array calibration method.

Multi detector arrays are commonly used in radiation oncology for IMRT and Linac QA. The calibration of detector arrays is usually based on the wide field calibration technique. Unfortunately small beam changes between measurements will result in large error propagation.

Junctioning longitudinally adjacent PTVs with Helical TomoTherapy.

Irradiation of longitudinally adjacent PTVs with Helical TomoTherapy (HT) may be clinically necessary, for example in treating a recurrent PTV adjacent to a previously-treated volume. In this work, the parameters which influence the cumulative dose distribution resulting from treating longitudinally adjacent PTVs are examined, including field width, pitch, and PTV location. In-phantom dose distributions were calculated for various on- and off-axis cylindrical PTVs and were verified by ion chamber and film measurement.