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Determining the Optimal Collimator Position for Collimated Pencil Beam Scanning Proton Therapy


D Wang

D Wang*, B Smith , P Hill , E Gelover , R Flynn , D Hyer , University Of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

Presentations

TH-C-BRD-3 Thursday 10:15AM - 12:15PM Room: Ballroom D

Purpose:
There has been a growing interest in applying collimation to pencil beam scanning (PBS) proton therapy in order to sharpen the lateral dose falloff out of the target, especially at low energies. Currently, there is not a method to optimally determine the collimation position or margin around the target. A uniform margin would not be ideal due to the fact that an incoming symmetric pencil beam, after being intercepted by a collimator near the target boundary, will become asymmetric and experience a lateral shift away from its original spot location, leaving the target insufficiently covered. We demonstrate a method that optimally determines the collimator position on a per-spot basis, in order to maximize target dose while minimizing normal tissue dose.

Methods:
A library of collimated pencil beams were obtained through Monte Carlo simulation with a collimator placed at varying distances from the central axis of an incoming symmetrical pencil beam of 118 MeV and 5 mm sigma-in-air. Two-dimensional treatment plans were then created using this library of collimated pencil beams. For each spot position in a treatment plan, the collimator position was optimally determined in such a way that the resultant pencil beam maximized the ratio of in-target dose and out-of-target dose. For comparison, un-collimated treatment plans were also computed.

Results:
The spot-by-spot optimally determined collimator positions allowed the reduction of normal tissue dose while maintaining the same target coverage as un-collimated PBS. Quantitatively, the mean dose outside of the target was reduced by approximately 40% as compared to the plan without collimation.

Conclusion:
The proposed method determines the optimal collimator position for each spot in collimated PBS proton therapy. The use of a collimator will improve PBS dose distributions achievable today and will continue to be the subject of future investigations.


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