Advances in anthropomorphic thorax phantoms for radiotherapy: a review

Abstract

A phantom is a highly specialized device, which mimic human body, or a part of it. There are three categories of phantoms: physical phantoms, physiological phantoms, and computational phantoms. The phantoms have been utilized in medical imaging and radiotherapy for numerous applications. In radiotherapy, the phantoms may be used for various applications such as quality assurance (QA), dosimetry, end-to-end testing, etc. In thoracic radiotherapy, unique QA problems including tumor motion, thorax deformation, and heterogeneities in the beam path have complicated the delivery of dose to both tumor and organ at risks (OARs). Also, respiratory motion is a major challenge in radiotherapy of thoracic malignancies, which can be resulted in the discrepancies between the planned and delivered doses to cancerous tissue. Hence, the overall treatment procedure needs to be verified. Anthropomorphic thorax phantoms, which are made of human tissue-mimicking materials, can be utilized to obtain the ground truth to validate these processes. Accordingly, research into new anthropomorphic thorax phantoms has accelerated. Therefore, the review is intended to summarize the current status of the commercially available and in-house-built anthropomorphic physical/physiological thorax phantoms in radiotherapy. The main focus is on anthropomorphic, deformable thorax motion phantoms. This review also discusses the applications of three-dimensional (3D) printing technology for the fabrication of thorax phantoms.

3D-Printing Advances in Radiotherapy

“…To create the 3D printed phantoms, utilized printing technologies include fused deposition modeling (FDM) and polymer material jetting (PJT/MJT) [48].…”

PixelPrint4D: A 3D printing method of fabricating patient-specific deformable CT phantoms for respiratory motion applications

“…So far, RMPs made using cadaveric animal lungs contain the most detailed internal structures 31,32 . However, these cadaver phantoms cannot be preserved for long periods due to tissue degradation and thus are not capable of repeatable long-term testing 33 . To our knowledge, no prior RMP exists which includes anatomically accurate and detailed lung structures, can undergo non-rigid deformations, and is also suitable for long term use.…”

Dosimetric characterization of double network Fricke hydrogel based on PVA-GTA and phenylalanine peptide derivative

“…To this aim, phantoms containing dosimetric materials able not only to accurately measure 3D dose distributions, but also to mimic the deformation and motion of organs are required [12,13]. Various deformable dosimetric phantoms have been proposed in the literature, which use different manufacturing approaches and readout techniques [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”