ALGEBRA: ALgorithm for the heterogeneous dosimetry based on GEANT4 for BRAchytherapy

Abstract

Task group 43 (TG43)-based dosimetry algorithms are efficient for brachytherapy dose calculation in water. However, human tissues have chemical compositions and densities different than water. Moreover, the mutual shielding effect of seeds on each other (interseed attenuation) is neglected in the TG43-based dosimetry platforms. The scientific community has expressed the need for an accurate dosimetry platform in brachytherapy. The purpose of this paper is to present ALGEBRA, a Monte Carlo platform for dosimetry in brachytherapy which is sufficiently fast and accurate for clinical and research purposes. ALGEBRA is based on the GEANT4 Monte Carlo code and is capable of handling the DICOM RT standard to recreate a virtual model of the treated site. Here, the performance of ALGEBRA is presented for the special case of LDR brachytherapy in permanent prostate and breast seed implants. However, the algorithm is also capable of handling other treatments such as HDR brachytherapy.

Suitability of microDiamond detectors for the determination of absorbed dose to water around high‐dose‐rate 192Ir brachytherapy sources

“…Automatic geometric optimization and no optimization were used in the BrachyVision and Oncentra TPSs, respectively, to yield D w,TPS of 2 Gy at the nominal reference point of the detector, i.e., SDD + 1 mm, in all irradiation plans. TPS‐calculated absorbed dose distributions were checked using an independent MC dosimetry platform ALGEBRA . The agreement was to within 2% with the uncertainty of 2% ( k = 2) in ALGEBRA calculations.…”

A generic high-dose rate192Ir brachytherapy source for evaluation of model-based dose calculations beyond the TG-43 formalism

“…6 These codes (except 6) have all previously been used successfully for dosimetric studies in the field of brachytherapy. 2,12,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40] As compared to 5, 6 has extended the minimum energy cutoff for photon transport down to 1 eV (although such a low cutoff is not used in the current study). The photoelectric cross sections from ENDF/B VI release 8 (Refs.…”

Quantifying the effect of seed orientation in postplanning dosimetry of low‐dose‐rate prostate brachytherapy

“…The Monte Carlo brachytherapy algorithm ALBEGRA (Ref. 31) was used in this work. Voxel dimensions were rescaled to obtain 1 mm 3 bins to increase the simulation speed and decrease the standard error per simulation.…”