A real-time system to report abnormal events involving staff in a nuclear medicine therapy unit.

A system for internal and voluntary reporting of abnormal events in a Nuclear Medicine Therapy Unit is described. This system is based on the Internet of Things and is composed of an application for mobile devices and a wireless network of detectors. The application is addressed to healthcare professionals and is intended to be a user-friendly tool to make the reporting procedure little laborious. The network of detectors allows for a real-time measurement of the dose distribution in the patient's room. The staff was involved in all stages, from the design of the dosimetry system and mobile application up to their final testing. Face-to-face interviews were carried out with 24 operators in different roles in the Unit (radiation protection experts, physicians, physicists, nuclear medicine technicians and nurses). The preliminary results of the interviews and the current state of development of the application and the detection network will be described.

EURADOS intercomparison exercise on Monte Carlo modelling of a medical linear accelerator.

BACKGROUND: In radiotherapy, Monte Carlo (MC) methods are considered a gold standard to calculate accurate dose distributions, particularly in heterogeneous tissues. EURADOS organized an international comparison with six participants applying different MC models to a real medical linear accelerator and to one homogeneous and four heterogeneous dosimetric phantoms. AIMS: The aim of this exercise was to identify, by comparison of different MC models with a complete experimental dataset, critical aspects useful for MC users to build and calibrate a simulation and perform a dosimetric analysis. RESULTS: Results show on average a good agreement between simulated and experimental data. However, some significant differences have been observed especially in presence of heterogeneities. Moreover, the results are critically dependent on the different choices of the initial electron source parameters. CONCLUSIONS: This intercomparison allowed the participants to identify some critical issues in MC modelling of a medical linear accelerator. Therefore, the complete experimental dataset assembled for this intercomparison will be available to all the MC users, thus providing them an opportunity to build and calibrate a model for a real medical linear accelerator.

MedLinac2: a GEANT4 based software package for radiotherapy.

Dose distribution evaluation in oncological radiotherapy treatments is an outstanding problem that requires sophisticated computing technologies to optimize the clinical results (i.e. increase the dose to the tumour and reduce the dose to the healthy tissues). Nowdays, dose calculation algorithms based on the Monte Carlo method are generally regarded as the most accurate tools for radiotherapy. The flexibility of the GEANT4 (GEometry ANd Tracking) Monte Carlo particle transport simulation code allows a wide range of applications, from high-energy to medical physics. In order to disseminate and encourage the use of Monte Carlo method in oncological radiotherapy, a software package based on the GEANT4 Monte Carlo toolkit has been developed. The developed package (MedLinac2) allows to simulate in an adequate flexible way a linear accelerator for radiotherapy and to evaluate the dose distributions.