Three-dimensional dose verification for clinical treatments of small intracranial tumours.

Abstract

Cancers of the brain and central nervous system account for 1.6% of new cancers and 1.8% of cancer deaths globally. The highest rates of all developed nations are observed in Australia and New Zealand. There are known complexities associated with dose measurement of very small radiation fields. Here, 3D dosimetric verification of treatments for small intracranial tumours using gel dosimetry was investigated. An anthropomorphic head phantom with a 43 mm diameter and 63 mm long gel container was filled with PAGAT normoxic radiosensitive gel. In this work, we show results for a 12-field stereotactic radiotherapy treatment delivered using a Varian 21EX with BrainLAB mini-multi leaf collimator. The gel was read out using an Octopus-1Q laser optical CT scanner. Generally good agreement was observed between the measured doses and those calculated with the iPlan treatment planning system (pencil beam convolution); see Fig. I. For gamma criteria of 5%/5 mm the percentage of gamma values less than unity was 95% above the 80% isodose line, indicating good PTV coverage. For lower isodose regions approaching the boundaries of the container poorer agreement was observed. The feasibility of three-dimensional measurement of small field dose distributions in clinical contexts has been demonstrated. Development of this methodology has the potential to overcome many shortcomings of other dosimetric methods, such as limitations of spatial information (typically one- and two-dimensions), volume-averaging effects and perturbation due to poor mediamatching.