Clinical Dosimetry Measurements in Radiotherapy (2009 AAPM Summer School)

While radiation dosimetry is no longer the hot topic of research that it once was, new treatment modalities still have challenges to be solved and detector systems are constantly being developed. But as a relatively mature subject, there is no widely used current book devoted to clinical dosimetry. A primary purpose of producing this Summer School was to create such a text to help in the education of clinical physicists who had not had access to the forefront research into understanding radiation dosimetry. Making sure the dose delivered to the patient is what it should be is one of the most important jobs medical physicists have. There are many aspects to doing this, but at the core, the radiation must be accurately measured. One of the original major tasks of the AAPM was to establish methods which its members could use to reliably carry out this task, and it has been highly successful. There have been clinical dosimetry protocols and formalisms for brachytherapy dosimetry developed, calibration laboratories accredited, and a myriad of task group reports produced on different dosimetry techniques and delivery modalities.