Abstract:
In radiotherapy, it requires accurately calculated radiation dose to reach maximum
success in radiation treatments. Although Co-60 is widely used in certain applications
of therapeutic treatments of cancer, it is mandatory to have a treatment planning system
(TPS) to estimate reliable radiation dose on the targeted area. Along with that purpose,
this study focused on building up a system to estimate the treatment time by analyzing
2D computed tomography (CT) images. In such a treatment system, it is important
to identify the effective depth to the tumor from the patient’s surface, as it affects
the estimated treatment time. Axial 2D chest CT images were analyzed using Python
programming language to find the specific regions along the beam path to obtain the
effective depth while the estimation of treatment time was carried out using the source
to tumor distance (STD) setup. Estimated treatment time using this new system shows
significant variance compared to the existing system which estimates the treatment time
without considering the inhomogeneous materials in our body. It can be attributed as
such a variance is due to the consideration of different values of attenuation in tissues or
inhomogeneous materials which were obtained through the analyzed CT scan images to
the beam from the new system while attenuation values are considered to be equivalent
to water in the present system. With these results, this study revealed that different
attenuation values from inhomogeneous materials largely affect radiation treatment time
estimation.
