Monte Carlo simulation of the effect of magnetic fields on brachytherapy dose distributions in lung tissue material

The aim of this work was to use TOPAS Monte Carlo simulations to model the effect of magnetic fields on dose distributions in brachytherapy lung treatments, under ideal and clinical conditions. Idealistic studies were modeled consisting of either a monoenergetic electron source of 432 keV, or a polyenergetic electron source using the spectrum of secondary electrons produced by(192)Ir gamma-ray irradiation. The electron source was positioned in the center of a homogeneous, lung tissue phantom (rho = 0.26 g/cm(3)). Conversely, the clinical study was simulated using the VariSource VS2000 Ir-192 source in a patient with a lung tumor. Three contoured volumes were considered: the tumor, the planning tumor volume (PTV), and the lung. In all studies, dose distributions were calculated in the presence or absence of a constant magnetic field of 3T. Also, TG-43 parameters were calculated for the VariSource and compared with published data from EGS-brachy (EGSnrc) and PENELOPE. The magnetic field affected the dose distributions in the idealistic studies. For the monoenergetic and poly-energetic studies, the radial distance of the 10% iso-dose line was reduced in the presence of the magnetic field by 64.9% and 24.6%, respectively. For the clinical study, the magnetic field caused differences of 10% on average in the patient dose distributions. Nevertheless, differences in dose-volume histograms were below 2%. Finally, for TG-43 parameters, the dose-rate constant from TOPAS differed by 0.09% +/- 0.33% and 0.18% +/- 0.33% with respect to EGS-brachy and PENELOPE, respectively. The geometry and anisotropy functions differed within 1.2% +/- 1.1%, and within 0.0% +/- 0.3%, respectively. The Lorentz forces inside a 3T magnetic resonance machine during(192)Ir brachytherapy treatment of the lung are not large enough to affect the tumor dose distributions significantly, as expected. Nevertheless, large local differences were found in the lung tissue. Applications of this effect are therefore limited by the fact that meaningful differences appeared only in regions containing air, which is not abundant inside the human.