Date of Award

5-9-2005

Document Type

Thesis open access

Department

Computer Science

Abstract

Radiation therapy increasingly means Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and withit a trend towards inverse treatment planning. The metrics of a treatment consist of important conformality indices such as the Ian Paddick Conformality Index (IPCI), Dose Volume Histograms (DVH), as well as the conformance isodose lines. This final metric, which offers spatial information of radiation dose that the others do not, shows the results of simulating the treatment plan on the CAT scan images. A physician is able to examine this image and ascertain which portions of the anatomy are the recipients of different levels of radiation dose. Computing isodose curves is no simple task, especially when the set of CAT scan images becomes large. Our approach is to first interpolate a surface over a finite mesh of scalar data representing the dose distribution in that plane, then find the set of points which constitute that isodose level by using a variation on an approach called the Hit-and-Run algorithm. We examine the behavior of our algorithm in dealing with sample radiotherapy plans as well as constructed examples to determine the effectiveness of this approach.

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