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Doses to critical organs following radiotherapy and concomitant imaging of the larynx and breast

Regional Medical Physics Department, Newcastle General Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne NE4 6BE, UK

Correspondence: R M Harrison, PhD, Regional Medical Physics Department, Newcastle General Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne NE4 6BE, UK. E-mail: r.m.harrison{at}ncl.ac.uk

The development of conformal radiotherapy carries with it the implication of an increased number of imaging procedures at various stages throughout the overall treatment, principally for verification at some, or all, of the treatment fractions. This raises the issue of the balance between the benefit of these additional imaging exposures and the associated risk of radiocarcinogenesis arising from them. As such, it is necessary to appreciate the doses to critical organs for which individual carcinogenic risks have been estimated. In this study, doses to these organs have been measured with lithium fluoride thermoluminescence dosimetry loaded in anthropomorphic phantoms and subjected to realistic radiotherapy treatments of the larynx and breast, including concomitant CT and electronic portal imaging exposures associated with localization and verification of these treatments. Even for large numbers of concomitant images of either modality, arising from imaging at every fraction, the leakage and scatter from the radiotherapy itself is shown to dominate the overall organ dose, with imaging procedures generally contributing 5–20% of the total organ dose.

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