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A comparative study of rectal dose histograms in prostate brachytherapy: Some analytic and numerical results
Author(s) -
Song Jun S.,
Albert Michele,
D'Amico Anthony V.,
Cormack Robert A.
Publication year - 2005
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 - 10.1118/1.1852811
Subject(s) - histogram , brachytherapy , dose volume histogram , rectum , nuclear medicine , mathematics , radiation treatment planning , computer science , medicine , artificial intelligence , radiation therapy , radiology , image (mathematics) , surgery
A cumulative dose histogram is the graph of an integral function integrated over a domain V ⊂ R 3and is dubbed the dose‐volume histogram (DVH), the dose‐surface histogram (DSH) or the dose‐wall histogram (DWH), depending on the dimension and structure of the region V . This paper presents a comparative study of the three rectal dose histograms for sixty patients as well as for a cylindrical model of the rectum; in particular, the DSH and DVH for the cylindrical model with one point source are computed analytically in terms of elliptic integrals. The difference among the three relative dose histograms, averaged over the sixty patients, is less than 5%, whereas that between DVH and DWH for various wall‐thickness can be as large as 3 – 12cm 3in the range 60 – 100 Gy . The paper also contains an error analysis using two simple models of the rectum, for which the true DSH and DWH can be computed via numerical integration, to evaluate the effect of digitization. The digitized computation agrees quite well with the pre‐digitization numerical integration, within 1% or 0.2cm 3 , because of the low dose‐gradient effect near the rectum in prostate brachytherapy.