BACKGROUND: The frequency of C-arm fluoroscopy procedures is increasing and it has become prudent to increase the awareness of patient radiation exposure to minimize patient risk. There is a strong potential for variability in patient exposure levels and a need for minimizing unnecessary exposure. The variability in C-arm fluoroscopy can...
Photoneutron contamination produced during high-energy, external beam radiotherapy can contribute to total patient dose. This aspect of unwanted dose is not currently evaluated for patients undergoing radiation therapy. While multiple studies have examined the neutron dose from beams with energies above 10 MeV, research assessing neutron dose from a 10...
Radiation therapy is used in approximately half of all cancer treatments. The rapid advances in radiation therapy have led to techniques that are much more complex and therefore must be more carefully assessed for safety and efficacy. Accurate quality assurance methods must be implemented to provide patient safety and confidence...
In the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is responsible for setting annual dose limits. For cases of hot particle contamination these limits are set at depths in skin of 7 mg/cm², 300 mg/cm², and 1000 mg/cm². However, at such shallow depths, the lack of charged particle equilibrium (CPE) precludes...
Fiber-optic-coupled dosimeters (FOCDs) are a relatively new method in which to obtain in-vivo dose concomitant with radiation treatment. Accurate live dosing can be achieved virtually anywhere due to their small dimensions (0.2 mm) which can be accommodated by a catheter. The purpose of this experiment is to characterize the electron...
Purpose: Stereotactic radiation therapy and stereotactic radiosurgery deliver radiation precisely to tumors, using special equipment to position and demobilize patients. The VisionRT system, with its component AlignRT, is a non-invasive stereotactic positioning and tracking system that uses cameras to capture infra-red images of patients, and process these images, to obtain...
Eye plaque brachytherapy is an established technique for the treatment of ocular melanoma that allows for the preservation of the affected eye as well as visual function. A common treatment planning system for eye plaque procedures, Plaque Simulator (PS), assists physicists in calculating the radiation dose to the tumor and...
BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Exposure from medical radiation sources are on the rise in the United States. Often the highest potential source of radiation dose to patients and radiology staff occur during interventional radiology procedures performed using fluoroscopy and digital subtraction angiography (DSA) to provide image guidance in minimally invasive surgical procedures. Several...
Compliance with 10CFR 20.101 requires that exposure to the skin be assessed at a depth of 0.007 cm over 10 cm² area. This depth generally corresponds to the interface between the epidermal and dermal layers of the skin. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission states the criteria for evaluating skin dose from...
Fission product yields (FPYs) are used for a wide range of applications including nuclear fission theory, nuclear reactor design, reactor antineutrino anomaly, stellar nucleosynthesis, and nuclear forensics. These applications rely on FPYs that were last evaluated in 1993, which included measurements from all over the world up until 1993. In...