The feasibility of the pretreatment verification of 2D dose distributions in radiation therapy with small fields using the electronic portal imaging device

Abstract

Background: The present study aims to evaluate the performance of an Electronic portal imaging device (EPID) for measuring dosimetric parameters and for verification of dose in small photon fields.

Material and methods: In this study, the beam profiles were obtained using the amorphous silicon (a-Si) EPID for field sizes ranging from 1 × 1 to 10 × 10 cm 2 at energies 6 and 18 mega-voltage (MV). For comparison, the dosimetric parameters, including penumbra widths and field sizes, were measured with the pinpoint, diode, and Semiflex dosimeters. Finally, Rando Phantom was used to compare the two-dimensional (2D) Dose distribution between EPID and Treatment Planning System (TPS).

Results: In both 5 cm and 10 cm depths, there were large differences between the measured doses obtained from TPS, Pinpoint detector, and Farmer detector in 1 × 1 field size. The differences become negligible as the field sizes increase and from 3 × 3 field size to 10 × 10 field size, the maximum observed differences are 2 cGy and 2.4 cGy for 5 cm and 10 cm depths, respectively. The results indicate that the penumbra widths are smaller in the Gantry-Target (GT) direction compared to the Right-Left (RL) direction. The maximum difference (47.6%) was observed for EPID in the 10 × 10 field size, and the minimum difference (16.6%) was observed for TPS in the 1 × 1 field size. Finally, 2D dose distributions obtained by EPID and TPS exhibit excellent agreement.

Conclusion: EPID is an excellent tool for the measurement of dosimetry parameters such as dose profiles, penumbra widths, field sizes, and pretreatment verification of 2D dose distributions, especially in small fields.