Monte Carlo dosimetry of the most commonly used 192Ir high dose rate brachytherapy sources

The 192Ir sources are the most commonly used in high dose rate brachytherapy treatments. The aim of this paper is to provide the characteristic functions established by AAPM Task Group 43 (TG-43) using PENELOPE 2008.1 simulation code for the most widespread 192Ir sources in Spain: the Gammamed Plus and Varisource 2000 sources distributed by Varian Medical Systems and the MicroSelectron source distributed by Nucletron BV. Also the new model, mHDR-v2r, has been characterized for MicroSelectron source, including some changes from the previous design, mHDR-v2. The radial dose function, anisotropy function, air-kerma strength, dose rate constant and absorbed dose rate in water tables are in good agreement with available data from other calculations. The obtained values for the dose rate constant have been 1.111 ± 0.002 cGy/hU for the Gammamed Plus source, 1.111±0.002 cGy/hU for the MicroSelectron mHDR-v2 source, 1.112 ± 0,002 cGy/hU for the MicroSelectron mHDR-v2r source and 1.096 ± 0.002 cGy/hU for the Varisource 2000 source. Complete dosimetric results are available in http://bqseeds.sarh.es In this work, results have been obtained for the studied sources with the same calculation conditions and simulations that meet current recommendations. (Author) 28 refs.