Dose-area product ratio in external small-beam radiotherapy: beam shape, size and energy dependencies in clinical photon beams

Abstract

In small-field radiotherapy (RT), a significant challenge is to define the amount of radiation dose absorbed in the patient where the quality of the beam has to be measured with high accuracy. The properties of a proposed new beam quality specifier, namely the dose-area-product ratio at 20 and 10 cm depths in water or DAPR20,10, were studied to yield more information on its feasibility over the conventional quality specifier tissue-phantom ratio or TPR20,10. The DAPR20,10 may be measured with a large-area ionization chamber (LAC) instead of small volume chambers or semi-conductors where detector, beam and water phantom positioning and beam perturbations introduce uncertainties. The effects of beam shape, size and energy on the DAPR20,10 were studied and it was shown that the DAPR20,10 increases with increasing beam energy similarly to TPR20,10 but in contrast exhibits a small beam size and shape dependence. The beam profile outside the beam limiting devices has been shown to have a large contribution to the DAPR20,10. There is potential in large area chambers to be used in DAPR measurement and its use in dosimetry of small-beam RT for beam quality measurements.