Brachytherapy refers to the therapeutic use of encapsulated radionuclides within
or close to a tumor. Today brachytherapy is used as an alternative to surgery or beam
therapy to treat different kinds of cancers such as breast, lung, prostate, ovarian and
pancreatic, primary and metastatic hepatic tumors and rheumatoid arthritis.
Microspheres are one therapy utilized in brachytherapy procedures. Despite the
development of advanced equipment and methods, there is still a limited knowledge of
radiation dose distribution when utilizing this technique.
This study focuses on random packing of microspheres and seeks to determine
dose distributions for specific cases. The Monte Carlo Neutral Particle code (MCNP)
developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory is used to simulate beta particle
transport. Pr-142 is the beta source utilized for all calculations. The cylinder radii are
0.1, 0.15 and 0.3 cm and sphere radii are 0.03, 0.05 and 0.07 cm. The results are verified
by examining limiting cases: uniformly distributed source and line of microspheres.
Based on the data collected, the correlations between the average dose, its related
variance, and distance from the cylinder were determined. An approach for estimating
the surface average dose was developed and suggestions regarding an approach to assess
surface variance estimation were presented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4854 |
| Date | 25 April 2007 |
| Creators | Urashkin, Alexander |
| Contributors | Reece, Dan W. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 839622 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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