Highlights
- •GATE simulations for preclinical and clinical medical imaging dosimetry.
- •Realistic radiotherapy simulations for absorbed dose assessment.
- •Personalized dosimetry using MC and computational models.
- •Comparison of GATE dosimetry with other MC codes.
- •Review on the GATE dosimetry simulations.
Abstract
Purpose
Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are a well-established method for studying physical processes
in medical physics. The purpose of this review is to present GATE dosimetry applications
on diagnostic and therapeutic simulated protocols. There is a significant need for
accurate quantification of the absorbed dose in several specific applications such
as preclinical and pediatric studies.
Methods
GATE is an open-source MC toolkit for simulating imaging, radiotherapy (RT) and dosimetry
applications in a user-friendly environment, which is well validated and widely accepted
by the scientific community. In RT applications, during treatment planning, it is
essential to accurately assess the deposited energy and the absorbed dose per tissue/organ
of interest, as well as the local statistical uncertainty. Several types of realistic
dosimetric applications are described including: molecular imaging, radio-immunotherapy,
radiotherapy and brachytherapy.
Results
GATE has been efficiently used in several applications, such as Dose Point Kernels,
S-values, Brachytherapy parameters, and has been compared against various MC codes
which are considered as standard tools for decades. Furthermore, the presented studies
show reliable modeling of particle beams when comparing experimental with simulated
data. Examples of different dosimetric protocols are reported for individualized dosimetry
and simulations combining imaging and therapy dose monitoring, with the use of modern
computational phantoms.
Conclusions
Personalization of medical protocols can be achieved by combining GATE MC simulations
with anthropomorphic computational models and clinical anatomical data. This is a
review study, covering several dosimetric applications of GATE, and the different
tools used for modeling realistic clinical acquisitions with accurate dose assessment.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 21, 2017
Accepted:
February 10,
2017
Received in revised form:
February 8,
2017
Received:
January 6,
2017
Identification
Copyright
© 2017 Associazione Italiana di Fisica Medica. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
