A Novel Algorithm in Radiation Dosimetry of Regular and Irregular Treatment Fields

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to design an algorithm for the calculation of monitor unit (MU) in a short time and high precision for different radiotherapy (RT) fields. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The algorithm for calculating MU for the stated patients was designed in MATLAB software. To investigate the efficiency of this algorithm, 11 regular chest fields with the sizes of 7 cm × 7 cm up to 17 cm × 17 cm were considered, and the obtained MUs were compared with MUs of 13 patients which were calculated with a “hand calculation” which is used in some RT centers for the aforementioned fields. RESULTS: The maximum percentage of calculation errors of regular fields at the depths of 4 and 10 cm were 1 and 0.8, respectively. The maximum and minimum percentage of calculation errors in irregular fields was 3 and 0.9, respectively. Furthermore, the maximum and minimum errors were 8.8 and 0.14, respectively. In addition, relative percentages of the MUs for irregular fields of chest and supraclavicular were 1.63 and 1.01, respectively. CONCLUSION: Calculation of MUs is suggested to be performed with the novel proposed algorithm, due to reduce the treatment time, and also provide high accuracy and precision compared to hand calculation.