Development of an improved approach to radiation treatment therapy using high-definition patient-specific voxel phantoms

Through an internally funded project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a high-resolution phantom was developed based on the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Data. Special software was written using the interactive data language (IDL) visualization language to automatically segment and classify some of the organs and the skeleton of the Visible Male. A high definition phantom consisting of nine hundred 512 x 512 slices was constructed of the entire torso. Computed tomography (CT) images of a patient's tumor near the spine were scaled and morphed into the phantom model to create a patient-specific phantom. Calculations of dose to the tumor and surrounding tissue were then performed using the patient-specific phantom