Arcispedale S. Maria Nuova

Medical Physics Department
Director: Dr. Mauro Iori


The S. Maria Nuova Hospital (www.asmn.re.it) is equipped with two Varian accelerators (2100CD and 600CD) and in the first quarter of 2008 a new TomoTherapy^® Hi·Art^®  II system will be installed. Being involved in the Varian beta-site groups for intensity-modulated treatments, our centre started the commissioning, QA and pre-clinical verification of its IMRT treatments with the PTW devices at the beginning of 2000. Therefore, we acquired and tested the MULTIDOS, QC6Plus system, MP3 water phantom,  2D-ARRAY seven29 and LA48 together with a large set of detectors (ionization chambers, diodes and  diamond detectors). If the universal IMRT Verification Phantom with film-dosimetry and two ionization chambers were used at the beginning for the IMRT commissioning, plastic phantoms and the 2D-ARRAY device, with/without the film-dosimetry or the Merge seven29 option, are today our principal method to measure our DMLC-IMRT treatments.

In the beginning of 2001 our centre started to apply clinically IMAT treatment planned in a forward way (IMMA). The commissioning and the dosimetric pre-clinical verification were done using the PTW phantoms specific for dynamic MLC arc treatments: IMRT Head Phantom and IMRT Head/Neck Phantom. After the introduction of the IMAT-SIM method, the 2D-Array was even used for the IMAT dosimetry verification.

Some new PTW products, in particular the OCTAVIUS phantom together with the VeriSoft software, were tested and applied to dosimetry verify some IMAT and Tomotherapy treatment plans. We are actually working on the dosimetry of IMRT and IMAT treatments, analysed with the VeriSoft software, using the EPID device and PTW systems. We are excited to test, as soon as it will be ready, the future PTW device, developed for the 2D-ARRAY detector, for the dosimetry of IMRT and IMAT gating treatments.

Comprehensive PTW measuring and quality control equipment is also used in our routine work in medical physics. The area of physics dealing with radiotherapy is composed by 2 senior physicists, 3 physicists in training and 2 technologists.