The development and application of a human phantom for radiation therapy planning

In radiotherapy departments, there is a need to accurately measure the absorbed doses within and around the irradiated body tissues. It necessitates the use of carefully selected materials from which phantoms can be constructed. The fundamental advantage of such materials is that their employment can permit determination of absorbed doses in more realistic conditions. In general, the phantom used for dosimetry purposes is cubical and filled with homogenous material but the patient is neither cubic nor homogenous in composition. Doses data obtained from measurements in a 'phantom', therefore, can only be approximation to the doses being received at corresponding points in a patient. Though this approximation works well but for most accurate dosimetry work we need to develop an anatomical phantom, because bone attenuates more radiation than soft tissue or lung which is air filled their attenuation is less compared to soft tissue