Development of a liver gel-dosimetry motion phantom for real-time image guided radiotherapy verification

Graduate Investigator: Charles Matrosic

Summary of Research: Real-time image guided radiotherapy (IGRT) has become increasingly common in the clinic as a method to more preciselydeliver dose during external beam radiotherapy (EBRT). To ensure clinical safety, treatment plans utilizing these systems must be measured to verify the accuracy of dose delivery. While different treatment quality assurance (QA) methods are readily available, this work focuses on the use of gel dosimetry as a tool for QA. Gel dosimetry has the ability to effectively measure three dimensional dose distributions, and also has proven to be tissue equivalent, dose rate independent, and energy independent. Also, gel dosimeters can be deformed to better represent tumor motion and deformation.The primary goal of this work is to create and test a normoxic gel dosimetry protocol and to create a dynamically deformable liver phantom to assess the accuracy of dose delivery by a new real-time IGRT system.