An accurate method for energy spectrum reconstruction of Linac beams based on EPID measurements of scatter radiation

Abstract

This work presents a methodology to reconstruct a Linac high energy photon spectrum beam. The method is based on EPID scatter images generated when the incident photon beam impinges onto a plastic block. The distribution of scatter radiation produced by this scattering object placed on the external EPID surface and centered at the beam field size was measured. The scatter distribution was also simulated for a series of monoenergetic identical geometry photon beams. Monte Carlo simulations were used to predict the scattered photons for monoenergetic photon beams at 92 different locations, with 0.5 cm increments and at 8.5 cm from the centre of the scattering material. Measurements were performed with the same geometry using a 6 MeV photon beam produced by the linear accelerator. A system of linear equations was generated to combine the polyenergetic EPID measurements with the monoenergetic simulation results. Regularization techniques were applied to solve the system for the incident photon spectrum. A linear matrix system, A×S=E, was developed to describe the scattering interactions and their relationship to the primary spectrum (S). A is the monoenergetic scatter matrix determined from the Monte Carlo simulations, S is the incident photon spectrum, and E represents the scatter distribution characterized by EPID measurement. Direct matrix inversion methods produce results that are not physically consistent due to errors inherent in the system, therefore Tikhonov regularization methods were applied to address the effects of these errors and to solve the system for obtaining a consistent bremsstrahlung spectrum.