Radiotherapy
4/5/2011: Note from Prof. Alan Nahum.
We are now very close to being able to take a radiotherapy treatment plan (i.e. a characteristic of each radiation beam and the CT representation of patient anatomy) and simulate it on the highly sophisticated Vancouver BEAMnrc MC system (specifically adapted to advanced radiotherapy delivery techniques, known generally as intensity modulation) via the NW-GRID. This will provide highly accurate dose distributions for selected treatments carried out at our radiotherapy centre (one of the largest and best equipped in Europe) which will then be compared in detail with the doses obtained from analytical methods; we term this whole process Monte Carlo based Quality Assurance of Advanced Radiotherapy Techniques (MCQAART). As far as we are aware, we will be the first radiotherapy centre in the UK to have implemented MCQAART and this will have been made possible by the use of NW-GRID.