Dosimetry quality control based on percent depth dose rate variation for checking beam quality in radiotherapy

Abstract

Recently, the quality management inside a radiotherapy department has been crucial to treat cancer efficiently. Thus, many international bodies recommend multiple methods to check in periodically the dosimetry quality beyond the depth of 10 cm as the beam quality index. However, they evade checking out the beam dosimetry quality on both the build-up dose and the electronic equilibrium regions. The objective of this study is to cover the overall variation of the percent depth dose (PDD) by including all sub-regions in the procedure evaluation of the beam quality.

In this work, we have studied and examined the dosimetry quality by considering the whole PDD variation. The PDD rate is therefore introduced to determine accurately the quality as an overall notion in external beam radiotherapy according to the field size and photon beam energy. We have presented the reasons and methods to introduce particles contamination, such as electrons and low photon energy in this new approach. The latter enables us to figure the dosimetry quality by extending the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) procedure at any field size less than 25 × 25 cm² under the current conditions without being limited to 10 × 10 cm² on the exponential decay region.