Abstract
New radiotherapy treatment techniques involve complex equipment and procedures requiring the synchronisation of the treatment delivery with the patient breathing motion. To validate the effectiveness of these new radiation dose delivery techniques,new quality control and research equipment are required. Treatments are evaluated, before being delivered to actual patients, using devices referred to, as phantom.
During the MAESTRO project, a phantom was developed to evaluate the motion compensation treatments prototype being developed. The phantom comprises four motors that have to be controlled synchronously. The major part of this works aimed to investigate alternative control method to make the phantom follow required
trajectories mimicking tumour and ribs motion. In addition, the sequence control and frequency control was implemented using LabVIEW and specialised drive system connected to one of the phantom motor. The resulting solution was proved accurate
but suffered from high operating temperature. An alternative sequence control was also developed to attempt to improve the motor reliability and enable to change the motor velocity interactively. The latter resulted in the development of a new laboratory exercise for MSc teaching.
The second type of contribution was to improve the design and tuning of video tracking systems to address issues associated with varying lighting in the different location used by the MAESTRO team to test the patient support motion compensation system. The re-tuned and modified software was used in the final MAESTRO
demonstration.
The third set of contributions was to propose mechanical based practical solutions to first simplify the set-up of video camera at each experiment, to improve the rigidity of the film holder used to mimic a cancerous tumour, and propose means to add a lateral rib motion without any additional motor.
The culmination of the practical work was to take place in the ultimate verification of the proposed patient motion compensation system being responsible for the video tracking system.
Date of Award | 2011 |
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Original language | English |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisor | Olivier haas (Supervisor), Tomasz Larkowski (Supervisor) & Keith Burnham (Supervisor) |