The incorporation of specific tissue/nuclide attenuation data into the Anderson method for producing brachytherapy volume-dose histograms

Anderson has proposed an analytical method for deriving volume-dose histograms relating to three-dimensional brachytherapy distributions. Because the mathematical transformation allows the otherwise dominant effects of the inverse-square fall-off about individual sources to be effectively suppressed, the resulting histograms provide the potential for visually and numerically assessing the overall quality of a brachytherapy treatment. In this paper the Anderson equations have been combined with the radial-dose polynomials of Dale, which are applicable to a number of tissue/nuclide combinations, and the predictions of the combined formalism have been used to further investigate the physical aspects of brachytherapy dosimetry. The problems associated with the dosimetry of low-energy gamma-emitters such as 125I are once again highlighted, as are the potential advantages of using a radionuclide with an intermediate gamma-ray energy.