SUMMARY

In today’s society, cancer afflicts everyone in some way, whether they themselves are afflicted with the disease or through a sick family or friend. Much effort has been put into the treatment of this disease through the use of radiation therapy. The computational methodologies used to calculate the amount of radiation dose a patient has received typically uses some short cut methods, thus there is some increased uncertainty of the dose due to this. In the Computational Reactor and Medical Physics Group here at Georgia Tech, a Coarse Mesh Transport (COMET) Method has been developed and successfully used in Nuclear Engineering based applications to determine whole core criticality. Response functions, or rather detailed solutions, are obtained for each unique local problem. These response functions are all pre-computed and stored in a library. The solution to the global solution is then bound by a linear superposition of the local problems. It is now being applied to the treatment of cancer. In my master’s thesis work, I applied COMET to a much simplified problem and calculated the amount of energy deposited in benchmark problems from photon only transport. The main goal of my doctoral work is to make COMET applicable to clinical situations in the treatment of cancer. First, an expansion of my work from my Master’s thesis will be done to include the transport of electrons when previously it did not. Experiments will be performed at Emory in order to validate COMET and create experimental benchmarks. It will be compared to both the treatment planning software and measurements made directly from the Linear Accelerator. A response function library and interpolation scheme for accessing response functions should also be composed. This is of utmost importance if the response functions are to be reused for different patients. Overall, the main goal is fully evaluate COMET and offer recommendations on how to improve it further.