A New Approach for Heterogeneity Corrections for Cs-137 Brachytherapy Sources

BACKGROUND: Most of the current brachytherapy treatment planning systems (TPS) use the TG-43U1 recommendations for dosimetry in water phantom, not considering the heterogeneity effects. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is developing a method for obtaining correction factors for heterogeneity for Cs-137 brachytherapy sources based on pre-calculated MC simulations and interpolation. METHOD: To simulate the effect of phantom heterogeneity on dose distribution around Cs-137 sources, spherical water phantoms were simulated in which there were spherical shells of bone with different thicknesses (0.2cm to 1.8cm with 0.1cm increment) at different distances (from 0.1cm to 10cm, with 0.5cm increment) from the source center. The spherical shells with 0.1cm thickness at different distances from 0.1cm to 10cm were used as tally cells. The doses at these cells were obtained by tally types F6, *F8, and *F4.The results indicate that the percentage differences between the doses in heterogeneity sections with the dose at the same positions inside the homogeneous water phantom vary when the distance of bone section from the source center increases, because of decreasing the average energy of photons reaching the bone layer. Finally, the results of Monte Carlo simulations were used as the input data of MATLAB software, and the percentage dose difference for each new configuration (i.e. different thickness of inhomogenity at different distances from the source) was estimated using the 2D interpolation of MATLAB. RESULTS: According to the results, the algorithm used in this study, is capable of dose estimation with high accuracy. CONCLUSION: The developed method using the results of Monte Carlo simulations and the dose interpolation can be used in treatment planning systems for heterogeneity corrections.