Program Information
Beam Quality Correction Factors for Linear Accelerator with and Without Flattening Filter
D Czarnecki1*, P von Voigts-Rhetz1 , B Poppe2 , K Zink1 , (1) Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen - University of Applied Sciences, Giessen, Germany, (2) University Hospital for Medical Radiation Physics, Pius-Hospital, Medical Campus, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany
Presentations
SU-G-TeP1-3 (Sunday, July 31, 2016) 4:00 PM - 4:30 PM Room: ePoster Theater
Purpose:
The impact of removing the flattening filter on absolute dosimetry based on IAEA’s TPR-398 and AAPM’s TG-51 was investigated in this study using Monte Carlo simulations.
Methods:
The EGSnrc software package was used for all Monte Carlo simulations performed in this work. Five different ionization chambers and nine linear accelerator heads have been modeled according to technical drawings. To generate a flattening filter free radiation field the flattening filter was replaced by a 2 mm thick aluminum layer.
Dose calculation in a water phantom were performed to calculate the beam quality correction factor kQ as a function of the beam quality specifiers %dd(10)x, TPR20,10 and mean photon and electron energies at the point of measurement in photon fields with (WFF) and without flattening filter (FFF).
Results:
The beam quality correction factor as a function of %dd(10)x differs systematically between FFF and WFF beams for all investigated ionization chambers. The largest difference of 1.8% was observed for the largest investigated Farmer-type ionization chamber with a sensitive volume of 0.69 cm³. For ionization chambers with a smaller nominal sensitive volume (0.015 – 0.3 cm³) the deviation was less than 0.4% between WFF and FFF beams for %dd(10)x > 62%. The specifier TPR20,10 revealed only a good correlation between WFF and FFF beams (< 0.3%) for low energies.
Conclusion:
The results confirm that %dd(10)x is a suitable beam quality specifier for FFF beams with an acceptable bias. The deviation depends on the volume of the ionization chamber. Using %dd(10)x to predict kQ for a large volume chamber in a FFF photon field may lead to not acceptable errors according to the results of this study. This bias may be caused by the volume effect due to the inhomogeneous photon fields of FFF linear accelerators.
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