A Complete Dosimetric Model of the Gamma Knife Perfexion Using Penelope Monte Carlo Codes

The Gamma Knife Perfexion is a radiosurgical treatment device used to irradiate targets in the head. It uses 192 high-activity Cobalt-60 sources collimated to a common focus to impart radiological damage to the target structure while minimizing dose to adjacent healthy tissue. Tungsten collimators are organized into eight sectors of 24 sources each; each sector can be set to one of three collimation sizes. The collimators can produce nominal spheres of dose 16 mm, 8 mm, or 4 mm in diameter at the focus. Planning for Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery (GK SRS) is performed using images from computed tomography (CT) and/or magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, as well as manual skull measurements. The manufacturer's software used to plan the delivery of these treatments uses a simplistic set of assumptions that do not consider heterogeneous tissue structures.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Best, Ryan C. M.

• dose distribution

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/37443

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/37443