Abstract
The state of the art Intensity Modulate Radiation Therapy (IMRT) has been one of the most significant breakthroughs in the cancer treatment in the past 30 years. There are two types of IMRT systems. The first system is the binary-based tomotherapy, represented by the Peacock (Nomos Corp) and Tomo unit (TomoTherapy Inc.), adopting specific binary collimator leafs to deliver intensity modulated radiation fields in a serial or helical fashion. The other uses the conventional dynamic multileaf collimator (MLC) to deliver intensity modulated fields through a number of gantry positions. The proposed Arc Binary IMRT attempts to deliver Tomo-like IMRT with conventional dynamic MLC and combines the advantages of the two types of IMRT techniques: (1) maximizing the number of pencil beams for better dose optimization, (2) enabling conventional linear accelerator with dynamic MLC to deliver Tomo-like IMRT.In order to deliver IMRT with conventional dynamic MLC in a binary fashion, the slice-by-slice treatment with limited slice thickness has been proposed in the thesis to accommodate the limited MLC traveling speed. Instead of moving the patient to subsequent treatment slices, the proposed method offsets MLC to carry out the whole treatment, slice by slice sequentially, thus avoid patient position error.By denoting one arc pencil beam set as a gene, genetic algorithm (GA) is used as the searching engine for the dose optimization process. The selection of GA parameters is a crucial step and has been studied in depth so that the optimization process will converge with reasonable speed.Several hypothetical and clinical cases have been tested with the proposed IMRT method. The comparison of the dose distribution with other commercially available IMRT systems demonstrates the clear advantage of the new method.The proposed Arc Binary Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy is not only theoretically sound but practically feasible. The implementation of this method would expand the capacity of the conventional linear accelerators in delivering high quality IMRT.