spread-out-Bragg-peak | chief advantage of proton therapy

spread-out-Bragg-peak is a Python library. spread-out-Bragg-peak has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. However spread-out-Bragg-peak build file is not available. You can download it from GitHub.

The chief advantage of proton therapy over X-ray therapy is that doses can be administered at more precisely controlled depths beneath the skin, avoiding damage to healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. Unlike X-rays, the dose of which decays approximately exponentially with depth d beneath the skin, protons' dose increases as they slow down, dropping rapidly to zero after they come to a standstill (Figure 1). Figure 1. Comparison of depth-dose profiles for an X-ray beam (in red) and proton beam (in solid blue). Multiple proton beams are shown with different energies. The dashed blue line delineates a spread-out Bragg peak (SOBP) created by superposition of 12 monoenergetic beams. It is designed such that 100% dose is reached in the tumor area (shaded gray). (Source: Wikipedia). In radiotherapy applications, it is typically required to cover an extended tumor volume with a required dose. Such a 'spread-out Bragg peak' (SOBP) can be achieved by superposition of elementary Bragg peak depth-dose curves. This script determines the weighting factors W(R) for the Bragg peaks of range R such that the superposition results in a flat SOBP of height D0 within an interval [da,db]. The approach follows Bortfeld & Schlegel (1996), who obtained an analytical solution. The numerical solution can be more easily extended, however, to experimentally determined Bragg peaks which do not exactly fit the power law range-energy relationship assumed.