PyMCGPU-IR: a new tool for patient dose monitoring in interventional radiology procedures
(English) Interventional radiology procedures are associated with potentially high radiation doses to the skin. The 2013/59/EURATOM Directive establishes that the equipment used for interventional radiology must have a device or a feature informing the practitioner of relevant parameters for assessi...
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| Tipo de documento: | tese |
| Data de publicação: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositório: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/421222 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/421222 https://dx.doi.org/10.5821/dissertation-2117-421222 |
| Access Level: | Acceso aberto |
| Palavra-chave: | 615 Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria biomèdica |
| Resumo: | (English) Interventional radiology procedures are associated with potentially high radiation doses to the skin. The 2013/59/EURATOM Directive establishes that the equipment used for interventional radiology must have a device or a feature informing the practitioner of relevant parameters for assessing patient dose at the end of the procedure. Monte Carlo codes of radiation transport are considered to be one of the most reliable tools available to assess doses. However, they are usually too time consuming for use in clinical practice. This thesis has been developed at the Institute of Energy Technologies of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya within the framework of the European project "Implications of Medical Low Dose Radiation Exposure" (MEDIRAD). The main objective of this work is to develop a software tool based on the Monte Carlo program MC-GPU for assessing the skin dose in patients undergoing interventional radiology (IR) procedures. The achievement of this objective can be divided into two main blocks: the validation of MC-GPU and the development and validation of PyMCGPUIR, a skin dose calculation tool for IR procedures based on MC-GPU. For the validation of MC-GPU, simulations were conducted and compared with the well-validated code PENELOPE/penEasy and then compared against thermoluminescent measurements performed on slab phantoms, both in a calibration laboratory and at a hospital. MC-GPU demonstrated excellent agreement in organ dose distribution, with differences below 1%, despite reducing the calculation time by a factor of 2500. Comparisons with thermoluminescent measurements indicated agreements within 10%, validating MC-GPU’s ability to provide accurate dose estimates in real clinical setups in very short times. In this work we have also developed PyMCGPU-IR, a new software tool based on the Monte Carlo program MC-GPU for assessing skin dose and organ doses in patients undergoing an interventional radiology (IR) procedure. PyMCGPU-IR has been validated through skin and organ dose measurements in an anthropomorphic phantom and showed differences below 6% in skin dose measurements and mostly below 20% in organ doses in clinical procedures. PyMCGPU-IR offers both, high performance and accuracy for dose assessment when compared with skin and organ dose measurements. It also allows the calculation of dose values at specific positions and organs, the dose distribution and the location of the maximum dose per organ. In addition, PyMCGPU-IR overcomes the time limitations of CPU-based MC codes. In this thesis we have shown that PyMCGPU-IR is an innovative Skin Dose Calculation (SDC) tool that offers higher performance and accuracy for skin dose calculations compared to most available SDCs. Currently, PyMCGPU-IR provides dose values only after the procedure has finished. In the future, PyMCGPU-IR could be adapted to provide real-time dose calculation if real-time radiation source information is available. |
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