Influence of the electron energy and number of beams on the absorbed dose distributions in radiotherapy of deep seated targets

With the advent of compact laser-based electron accelerators, there has been some renewed interest on the use of such charged particles for radiotherapy purposes. Traditionally, electrons have been used for the treatment of fairly superficial lesions located at depths of no more than 4 cm inside the patient, but lately it has been proposed that by using very high energy electrons, i.e. those with an energy in the order of 200-250 MeV it should be possible to safely reach deeper targets. In this paper, we used a realistic patient model coupled with detailed Monte Carlo simulations of the electron transport in such a patient model to examine the characteristics of the resultant absorbed dose distributions as a function of both the electron beam energy as well as the number of beams for a particular type of treatment, namely, a prostate radiotherapy treatment. Each treatment is modeled as consisting of nine, five or three beam ports isocentrically distributed around the patient. An optimization algorithm is then applied to obtain the beam weights in each treatment plan. It is shown that for this particularly challenging case, both excellent target coverage and critical structure sparing can be obtained for energies in the order of 150 MeV and for as few as three treatment ports, while significantly reducing the total energy absorbed by the patient with respect to a conventional megavoltage x-ray treatment.