Dosimetric accuracy of a deterministic radiation transport based 192Ir brachytherapy treatment planning system. Part I: single sources and bounded homogeneous geometries.

Purpose: The aim of this work is to validate a deterministic radiation transport based treatment planning system (TPS) for single 192Ir brachytherapy source dosimetry in homogeneous water geometries.

Methods: TPS results were obtained using the deterministic radiation transport option of a BRACHYVISION v. 8.8 system for three characteristic source designs (VS2000, GMPlus HDR, and GMPlus PDR) with each source either centered in a 15 cm radius spherical water phantom, or positioned at varying distance away from the phantom center. Corresponding MC simulations were performed using the MCNPX code v.2.5.0 and source geometry models prepared using information provided by the manufacturers.

Results: Comparison in terms of the AAPM TG-43 dosimetric formalism quantities, as well as dose rate distributions per unit air kerma strength with a spatial resolution of 0.1 cm, yielded close agreement between TPS and MC results for the sources centered in the phantom. Besides some regions close to the source longitudinal axes where discrepancies could be characterized as systematic, overall agreement for all three sources studied is comparable to the statistical (type A) uncertainty of MC simulations (1% at the majority of points in the geometry increasing to 2%-3% at points lying both away from the source center and close to the source longitudinal axis). A corresponding good agreement was also found between TPS and MC results for the sources positioned away from the phantom center.

Conclusions: Results of this work attest the capability of the TPS to accurately account for the scatter conditions regardless of the size or shape of a given geometry of dosimetric interest, and the position of a source within it. This is important since, as shown in the literature and summarized also in this work, these factors could introduce a significant dosimetric effect that is currently ignored in clinical treatment planning. It is concluded that the implementation of the deterministic radiation transport option of the BRACHYVISION v. 8.8 system for 192Ir brachytherapy dosimetry in homogeneous water geometries yields results of comparable accuracy to the golden standard of Monte Carlo simulation, in clinically viable calculation times.