摘要
Adjacent treatment fields are commonly employed in external beam radiation therapy, such as the mantle and inverted-Y fields for the treatment of Hodgkin's disease. In some cases, the adjacent fields are orthogonal, such as the craniospinal fields used in the treatment of medulloblastoma. Another example is the irradiation of head and neck tumors when the lateral neck fields are placed adjacent to the anterior supraclavicular field. In each of these situations, there is a possibility of introducing very large dosage errors across the junction. Consequently, this region is at risk for tumor recurrence if it is underdosed or severe complications if it is overdosed. Four millimeter overlap and gap resulted in an unacceptable dose in homogeneity in the junction. As a result of this study, the magnitudes of hot and cold spots might be clinically acceptable for 3 mm gap between photon fields.
