A hybrid stochastic-deterministic method, COMET-PE, is developed for dose calculation in radiotherapy. Fast, accurate dose calculation is a key component of successful radiotherapy treatment. To calculate dose, COMET-PE solves the coupled Boltzmann Transport Equations for photons and electrons. The method uses a deterministic iteration to compose response functions that are pre-computed using Monte Carlo. Thus, COMET-PE takes advantage of Monte Carlo physics without incurring the computational costs typically required for statistical convergence. This work extends the method to 3-D problems with realistic source distributions. Additionally, the performance of the deterministic solver is improved, taking advantage of both shared-memory and distributed-memory parallelism to enhance efficiency. To verify the method’s accuracy, it is compared with the DOSXYZnrc (Monte Carlo) method using three different benchmark problems: a heterogeneous slab phantom, a water phantom, and a CT-based lung phantom. For the slab phantom, all errors are less than 1.5% of the maximum dose or less than 3% of local dose. For both the water phantom and the lung phantom, over 97% of voxels receiving greater than 10% of the maximum dose pass a 2% (relative error) / 2 mm (distance-to-agreement) test. Timing comparisons show that COMET-PE is roughly 10-30 times faster than DOSXYZnrc. Thus, the new method provides a fast, accurate alternative to Monte Carlo for dose calculation in radiotherapy treatment planning.

published_or_final_version / Clinical Oncology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Micro-irradiation systems are used to analyse the effect of ionizing radiation at the cellular and tissue level, targeting individual cells within a population with a controlled low dose. Cell survival experiments using micro-irradiation systems are limited by factors including: 1) the radiation attenuation and optical properties of the chosen cell dish substrate, 2) the registration of the cell dish before and after irradiation or between multiple imaging modalities and 3) the analysis of the cell or colony growth after irradiation. In this thesis, a set of tools have been developed to improve micro-irradiation experiments and to increase the accuracy of information provided by the cell survival data. The first contribution, the substrate cell dish evaluation, provides a set of characteristics defining the substrates used for micro-irradiation experiments based on minimal energy loss and optical clarity using unstained cell imaging. The second contribution was the development of a novel and low cost fiducial marking device for micro-irradiation experiments using an 808 nm laser and providing marks suitable for imaging with multiple modalities. The minimum focused spot diameter was calculated as 22.9 urn and the device was used to create fiducial marks with diameters ranging from 20 urn to 130 urn. The third contribution, the development of a cell counting methodology for use with a lens-free imaging device, has been shown to accurately count thousands of cells suitable for immediate analysis. Approximately 1000 cell colonies, containing 17 729 cells on 11 cell dishes were used for testing and training for automatic cell counting. Validation of the cell counting method showed that 76% and 89% of the cell colonies were counted within a ± 20% and ± 30% error of the ground truth, respectively. Further development of the fiducial marking device, by modifying the choice of laser and making it suitable for multiple types of cell dish substrates, would increase the applications of the device. Development of the cell counting methodology for different cells line, and for cells grown on multiple types of substrates, would make the system suitable for analysis of a wide variety of cell survival studies. The cell counting methodology, applied to the CyMap lens-free imaging device, has the potential to be an extremely useful and cost effective tool for cell survival studies.

Common methods for commissioning linear accelerators often neglect beam data for small fields. Examining the methods of beam data collection and modeling for commissioning linear accelerators revealed little to no discussion of the protocols for fields smaller than 4 cm x 4 cm. This leads to decreased confidence levels in the dose calculations and associated monitor units (MUs) for Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT). The parameters of commissioning the Novalis linear accelerator (linac) on the Eclipse Treatment Planning System (TPS) led to the study of challenges collecting data for very small fields. The focus of this thesis is the examination of the protocols for output factor collection and their impact on dose calculations by the TPS for IMRT treatment plans. Improving output factor collection methods, led to significant improvement in absolute dose calculations which correlated with the complexity of the plans. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Not available / text

Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Univ., 2001. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karol. inst., 2004. / Härtill 6 uppsatser.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Univ., 2006. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Thesis (doctoral)--Lund University, 1998. / Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Göteborg, 1998. / Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted.