Article

Monte Carlo study of dose distribution improvement by skin-shielding layer design in boron neutron capture therapy for non-small-cell lung cancer

¹ Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, P.R. China
² Collaborative Innovation Center of Radiation Medicine of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, Nanjing 210016, P.R. China

^* Corresponding author: tanxiaobin@nuaa.edu.cn

Received: 19 April 2017
Accepted: 25 May 2018

Abstract

The skin dose exceeds its dose limitation easily in using an accelerator-based neutron source for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT). To solve this problem, design analyses in materials and thicknesses of skin-shielding schemes were investigated through Monte Carlo method. Two skin-shielding schemes were better and could reduce the healthy organ dose: scheme A (0.1 cm-thick thermoplastic with 96%-enriched ⁶LiF), and scheme B (0.6 cm-thick lithium carbonate). Scheme B with shorter irradiation time was the optimized schemes to improve the dose distribution of BNCT for NSCLC.