Computers in radiotherapy

Abstract

Radiotherapy is one of the earliest fields in Medicine in which computers have made an inroad. The main uses of computers, which include treatment planning, dose calculations, localisation of tumours, verification of patient setups and radiation beam data acquisition, are highlighted in this paper. It is believed that a modern Radiotherapy department cannot function optimally without some form of computing facilities. With advances made in dose calculation algorithms, and in high performance computers, it is expected that the target of 3% accuracy dose calculations can be achieved in treatment planning.