Main description:

This book provides a comprehensive overview of computational methods used in radiation oncology and imaging physics, addressing clinical and research applications. It reflects the way in which technology has revolutionized these fields, for example showing how highly accurate model-based dose calculation engines are derived from transport theory, and how optimization tools enable delivery of highly conformal dose distributions, and how image processing, registration, and reconstruction tools are driving towards adaptive treatment planning. Readers will gain the skillset needed to adapt general mathematical techniques to real problems encountered in today's practice.

Contents:

Review of Basic Mathematical and Physics concepts. Mathematics Review and Notation. Elementary probability and statistics. Photon collisions and radiation field quantities. Fourier analysis. Optimization. Analytical and numerical transport calculations for ionizing radiation dosimetry. Photon collisions and radiation field quantities. Mechanics of neutral particle Monte Carlo (MC) codes. Introduction to transport theory. Advanced variance reduction in neutral particle transport. Transport theory and absorbed dose. Charged particle transport and condensed history (CH) MC. Public domain MC codes. Applications of CH MC transport. Hogstrom pencil-beam model. Deterministic transport calculations. Photon calculation algorithms. Statistical analysis, modeling, and data reduction. More advanced statistics topics. Information and estimation theory. Outcome modeling/non parametric statistics. Modeling variability. Image processing, registration, and reconstruction. Linear systems theory. CT image reconstruction. Iterative image reconstruction. Basic Image processing. Rigid and nonrigid image registration. Treatment optimization and outcome modeling. Optimization Theory. Applications: IMRT. Emerging Applications.