WFU Physics Colloquium

All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.

The Gamma Knife Perfexion is a radiosurgical treatment device used to irradiate targets in the head. It uses 192 high-activity Cobalt-60 sources, collimated to a common focus to impart radiological damage to the target structure while minimizing dose to adjacent healthy tissue.

The software provided by the manufacturer of the Gamma Knife to plan the delivery of these treatments uses a simplistic set of assumptions that do not consider heterogeneous tissue structures. In this thesis Monte Carlo methods are used to model radiation interactions and track radiation transport. These methods have been shown to calculate dose more accurately in heterogeneous volumes than other dosimetry models. Experimental radiation measurements were used to assess an original implementation of these models.