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Benchmarking beam alignment for a clinical helical tomotherapy device
Author(s) -
Balog John,
Mackie T. R.,
Pearson D.,
Hui Susanta,
Paliwal Bhudatt,
Jeraj Robert
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.1576395
Subject(s) - tomotherapy , medical physics , benchmarking , detector , beam (structure) , dosimetry , nuclear medicine , medicine , computer science , optics , physics , radiation therapy , radiology , marketing , business
A clinical helical tomotherapy treatment machine has been installed at the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center. Beam alignment has been finalized and accepted by UW staff. Helical tomotherapy will soon be clinically available to other sites. Clinical physicists who expect to work with this machine will need to be familiar with its unique dosimetric characteristics, and those related to the geometrical beam configuration and its verification are described here. A series of alignment tests and the results are presented. Helical tomotherapy utilizes an array of post‐patient xenon‐filled megavoltage radiation detectors. These detectors have proved capable of performing some alignment verification tests. That is particularly advantageous because those tests can then be automated and easily performed on an ongoing basis.