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SU‐FF‐T‐384: Statistical Analysis of a System for Radiation Treatment Positioning Accuracy
Author(s) -
Chang YW,
Miller W,
Palta J
Publication year - 2007
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 - 10.1118/1.2761109
Subject(s) - radiation , range (aeronautics) , energy (signal processing) , position (finance) , radioactive source , statistics , physics , computational physics , optics , mathematics , materials science , finance , economics , composite material , detector
The purpose of this research is to provide an improved system for accurately positioning patients for external beam radiation treatments. Specifically, this paper addresses the statistics of the process and the selection of the source energy to obtain the greatest positioning accuracy. A change in detected counts of 1% results in either a dose change of 5% to 10% due to a position error or a dose change of around 1% due to density changes. Using a single high energy source and assuming the density doesn't change is more accurate than the uncertainties created by the dual source method. The dual source method has greater distance uncertainty than the single source if small changes in density are assumed. However, high energy sources are less sensitive to tissue density changes and are more precise for positioning confirmation. Therefore, a single marker source with high energy which is on the order of MeV range provides the greatest dose delivery accuracy by simply assuming all measured discrepancies are attributed to positioning errors only.