Photon beam characteristics on the MM50 racetrack microtron and a new approach for beam quality determination.

The photon beams of the MM50 racetrack microtron have special characteristics which make them more suitable than conventional photon beams for precision radiation therapy with good dosimetric control. The beam flattening is obtained by the scanning of an elementary beam instead of using a flattening filter. This will give a number of advantages such as the possibility to optimize field flattening to individual field forms and field sizes. The radiation quality is the same across the whole beam, which gives smaller changes in dose profiles with depth and also makes it easier to perform careful dose planning. Beam collimation is mainly performed by a multileaf collimator and the special design of the treatment head gives nearly ideal characteristics for dose determination in an arbitrary point in the treatment fields. The output factor has been shown to depend almost solely on scattering within the treatment field. The conventional methods for beam quality characterization have been found less suitable at high energies and a new method based on HVL measurements in water is proposed.