Radiotherapy

QA Radiotherapy

Modern radiotherapy delivers treatment with a 360° rotating gantry that produces X-rays in a continuous arc around the patient. This X-ray beam is continuously modulated and shaped by adjusting both its intensity and the shape of the beam. This results in a highly conformal dose distribution that changes continuously over time, making dosimetry during treatment significantly more complex than when treatment is delivered with static fields. Emerging methods such as small-field and high dose-rate irradiation are even more challenging with current dosimetry methods. Standard detectors such as ion chambers are unsuitable for measuring complex small fields due to volume averaging and loss of charge particle equilibrium. These problems can be solved with the proposed detector system consisting of an irradiated scintillator sheet that is photographed, from which the dose is reconstructed. This provides a cheap, fast, and high-resolution solution. But scintillation images come with a variety of visual artefacts that need correcting.

Experimental Runs

Details of each of the experimental data taking runs carried out at Birmingham.