In interstitial brachytherapy
the software is also used to check the realised treatment planning on
the patient: the software calculates the dose delivered to the patient,
thanks to the spatial localisation of the sources in the treatment target
(obtained with Computerised Tomography Interface).
What kind of software is available in hospitals in the present
Commercial softwares
The features of commercial
softwares available, used commonly in the clinical practice, are the
following:
Advantage of commercial
softwares: these softwares are very fast by a computational point of
view.
Disadvantage:these
softwares are chacterised by
Besidesrough approximate dose calculation; density insensitivity.
MonteCarlo simulations
A MonteCarlo simulation calculates
the dose distribution in an accurate way, without geometry or physics approximations,
but it's characterised by slow computational time.
In the present MonteCarlo
simulations are not used in the clinical practice for this cause: in brachytherapy
the time factor is very important; medical physicist often must decide
in real time the treatment .
A solution to this problem is given by tha MC simulation parallelisation and the access to distribuited computering resources.