Monte Carlo Simulation of Linear Accelerator for Dosimetry Analysis

Radiation therapy is a means to treat cancer that makes use of beams of intense energy to kill cells that are cancerous in nature. The equipment most often used for the procedure is the Linear Accelerator(LINAC). This machine produces beams of X-rays and transports them to the patient's cancerous region. The dose of radiation to be deposited on the patient body needs to be evaluated before application. This paper aims at simulating the radiotherapy process using a LINAC in order to carry out the dosimetric analysis. The simulation makes use of the Monte Carlo method, which has been proven to provide realistic results in terms of accuracy. The proposed work of simulation was carried out using GATE (Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission) software based on a 6MV Elekta Synergy Platform LINAC. Depth dose and dose profile curves were plotted for dosimetric analysis and uncertainty error values were compared with a similar work on the same field. It was observed that the values are in the same range, proving the credibility for the proposed simulation. This work is in collaboration with MVR Cancer centre at Calicut and is done for helping in the dosimetric analysis of their specific LINACs in future.