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The measuring instruments that prove a radiotherapy machine gives the dose it claims: ionisation chambers, detector arrays, water tanks and plastic stand-in patients, checked every day, month and year and before every complex plan is delivered.
Every radiotherapy dose rests on a chain of measurement. Calibrated ionisation chambers (the Farmer chamber design dates from the 1950s) in a water tank fix the machine's output against national standards; three-dimensional scanning tanks map beam profiles at commissioning; daily QA devices check output, flatness, symmetry and lasers before the first patient; and two-dimensional or cylindrical detector arrays (Sun Nuclear's MapCHECK and ArcCHECK, IBA's MatriXX, PTW's OCTAVIUS) measure each patient's IMRT or VMAT plan before it is delivered and compare it with the calculation, the patient-specific QA that AAPM Task Group 218 standardised. Anthropomorphic phantoms with inserts for film, thermoluminescent or optically stimulated dosimeters stand in for the patient in end-to-end tests and in the credentialing that the IROC Houston centre requires before a department may enter a clinical trial. Log-file analysis and independent dose calculation software (RadCalc, Sun Nuclear's SunCHECK, Radformation's ClearCheck) increasingly complement or replace measurement.
The vendors are few and specialised: Sun Nuclear and CIRS are now part of Mirion Medical, IBA Dosimetry belongs to the proton company IBA, and PTW in Freiburg has made chambers since the 1920s. The limits are the time these measurements take from machines and physicists, the sensitivity of array-based QA to the passing criteria chosen, and the difficulty of measuring at the ultra-high dose rates of FLASH or inside the magnetic field of an MR-linac.
Calibrated ionisation chambers, diode and scintillator arrays, film and luminescent dosimeters in water or tissue-equivalent phantoms measure absorbed dose and its distribution, traceable to primary standards, to verify machine output and each patient's plan.
Query for this technology: (TITLE:"Radiotherapy QA phantoms and dosimeters" OR ABSTRACT:"Radiotherapy QA phantoms and dosimeters" OR TITLE:"Sun Nuclear, IBA Dosimetry, PTW" OR ABSTRACT:"Sun Nuclear, IBA Dosimetry, PTW") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma). Results are unfiltered search hits about Radiotherapy QA phantoms and dosimeters (Sun Nuclear, IBA Dosimetry, PTW), not a curated reading list.
Shares In-room imaging for radiotherapy (cone-beam CT, ExacTrac, CT-on-rails, HyperSight), C-arm medical linear accelerators (TrueBeam, Versa HD and others), Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, Breast cancer (all types) and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares Sun Nuclear (Mirion), Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, Breast cancer (all types), Prostate cancer and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares In-room imaging for radiotherapy (cone-beam CT, ExacTrac, CT-on-rails, HyperSight), MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy, Breast cancer (all types), Prostate cancer and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares FLASH research accelerators (Oriatron, Mobetron FLASH, ProBeam FLASH), C-arm medical linear accelerators (TrueBeam, Versa HD and others), Breast cancer (all types), IMRT / IGRT (modern external beam) and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, Breast cancer (all types), IMRT / IGRT (modern external beam) and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, Breast cancer (all types) and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares Breast cancer (all types), Prostate cancer and the tag machines-wave2.
Shares Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, Breast cancer (all types) and the tag machines-wave2.
Open-source projects that implement or serve this technology, from OnCo's own catalogue: licence and last activity as the repository reported them on the day of the fetch. Listing is not endorsement; check the licence before reuse and the validation before clinical use.
The CERN-led toolkit for simulating the passage of particles through matter, the physics engine under TOPAS, GATE and much radiotherapy research.
A community Python library for medical physics: gamma analysis, dose comparison, log-file analysis and machine QA.
The National Research Council of Canada's Monte Carlo code for electron and photon transport, a reference for linac dosimetry.
Automated analysis of linac QA images: Winston-Lutz, picket fence, star shots, CBCT and planar phantoms following AAPM task group methods.
The OpenGATE collaboration's Geant4-based simulation platform for PET, SPECT, CT and radiotherapy dosimetry, now in Python.
The open-source release of TOPAS, the Geant4-based Monte Carlo tool for proton and photon therapy simulation used across radiotherapy physics.
An open-hardware personal radiation dosimeter from Stanford, built from a low-cost scintillator and off-the-shelf parts.
A graphical front end for pylinac-based linac quality assurance.