ABSTRACT
Simplified dose calculation model with high computation efficiency is often used to generate the dose matrices for beamlets in the inverse planning of the intensity modulate radiation therapy. It is likely that this simplification could degrade the quality of the final treatment plans. This paper is aimed at testing the influence of such simplification in dose calculations of beamlets and accordingly proposing methods to avoid severe degradation of the plans. Two simulation instances were adopted. The primary dose calculation model without involvment of scattering effect was used to generate the dose matrices of beamlets. The differential convolution superposition dose calculation model that well accounts for scattering effect was used to calculate the final dose distributions for given intensity profiles. It is found that the simplification in dose matrices of beamlets degrades the dose levels in the edge area of the targets, however, the degradation could be diminished or even avoided by adding a suitable margin around the targets or by using the multiple-shifted-beamlet-matrices (MSBM) method that was proposed in our previous paper.