E‐Brachy: New dosimetry package for electronic brachytherapy sources
Authors: Esmaelbeigi Azin , Kalinowski Jonathan , Tomic Nada , Rivard Mark J. , Vuong Te , Devic Slobodan , Enger Shirin A. 
Published: October 2024

Background

Large reported variability in the material composition and geometrical components of the Xoft electronic high dose rate brachytherapy causes inter‐source discrepancy in the source output. This variability is due to the manual manufacturing and assembly of the sources.

Purpose

This study aimed to develop a dosimetry software tool called E‐Brachy to characterize the Xoft source and quantify the discrepancies in its photon spectrum and dosimetric properties.

Methods

E‐Brachy is based on the Geant4 Monte Carlo toolkit and consists of two parts. In part one, the geometry and material composition for the source received in the computer‐aided design format from the vendor were converted to the geometry description markup language format using the GUIMesh Python tool and integrated into the E‐Brachy software. There was a large variation in material composition and thickness for some of the tube components. The simulation started from electrons and resulted in x‐ray generations in the anode region. Multithreading, a track length estimation, and the uniform bremsstrahlung splitting variance reduction techniques were used to decrease the simulation time and increase the x‐ray production. The photon energy, position, and momentum were saved into a phase space file as the photon exited the source, but before interacting with the external environment. The obtained x‐ray energy spectrum was compared with measurements from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In part two, by sampling from the generated photons, the dose rates and dosimetric parameters according to the TG‐43 protocol were calculated for model S7500 and compared to the ones previously calculated for model S700 source, which were deemed identical by the manufacturer.

Results

The material composition that resulted in the most similar spectrum as the measured NIST spectrum with Pearson's correlation coefficient of 0.99 and a calculated Euclidean difference of  keV was chosen for further dosimetric analysis of the model S7500 source. Characteristic peaks showed the presence of tungsten, yttrium, and silver in the source components. Differences in dose rates between the two source models surpassed 20% for polar angles , reaching a peak at  cm and . The differences in the radial dose function values were within 5%. The relative difference in percentage between the anisotropy function values of the two models was closer to 0 for smaller values, but at higher polar angles, they increased to 300%.

Conclusions

A software package called E‐Brachy was successfully developed for the characterization and dosimetry of Xoft electronic brachytherapy sources. E‐Brachy can be combined with spectral measurements to investigate the inter‐ and intra‐source variability. The software package was tested by comparing the simulated spectra from the S7500 Xoft source model with NIST measurements and its TG‐43 parameters with the S700 model. The TG‐43 parameters between the two sources significantly exceed the recommendations of TG‐56.