Optimization of Matching Adjacent Beam Fields using Mathematical Models in Comparison with the Treatment Planning System

In radiotherapy treatments, there are some situations where the shape of the target volume is complicated, so multiple radiation fields are used to cover the whole tumoral tissue. Therefore, adjusting adjacent fields and minimizing radiation dose to healthy tissues is an important goal in radiotherapy. The aim of this study is to introduce a general mathematical solution for matching adjacent radiation fields and also to evaluate this solution in therapeutic techniques such as Craniospinal irradiation and breast with a supraclavicular full-field and half-field irradiation. This method considers a right-handed system with its center located in the isocenter and two hypothetical fields named field number one and field number two. Then, the angles of collimators, couch, gantry, and the jaw aperture for both hypothetical fields are calculated to match between their side plates using the presented methods. Comparison of the measurements with the treatment planning system shows that the Craniospinal radiotherapy technique has an error only in measuring the collimator angle; this error is 0.198%. The maximum errors were obtained in two supraclavicular techniques with full- and half-field in calculating the size of the jaw aperture of the supraclavicular field, which were 21.05% and 18.6%, respectively. In conclusion, according to the results, this method can improve the field alignment in all cases where adjacent treatment fields are used, with the acceptable error rate and without changing the field size, to achieve the same dose distribution.