A formalism for calculation of absorbed dose to a medium from photon and electron beams.

A formalism is derived that relates the absorbed dose to a medium from photon and electron beams to the photon calibration factor of an ionization chamber. The formalism is applicable to the photon and electron beam energies that are currently of interest in radiation therapy. It is developed in terms of a cavity-gas calibration factor, a quantity characteristic of the chamber and independent of the energy of the calibration beam assuming the energy expended per ion pair is energy independent. The cavity-gas calibration factor can be obtained from a chamber calibration performed in terms of exposure, absorbed dose to water, or air kerma. The perturbation corrections due to replacement of the surrounding medium by the chamber wall and cavity are identified as ratios of the photon energy fluence, or the electron fluence, at the position of the chamber center. The unmanageable complexities of a theory that covers an ionization chamber made of several materials are avoided by limiting the development to a chamber made of a single material with the expectation that the inhomogeneities of real chambers can be treated as perturbations. Attention is called to certain theoretical aspects of this dosimetry development that do not appear to have been previously recognized.