[Determination of head scatter factors released from a scanning-type therapeutic accelerator]

The MM50 is a racetrack microtron capable of taking out photon beams and electron beams with energies of up to 50 MeV. It flattens the beam by the beam-scanning method, while the microtron MM22 utilizes a flattening filter. The head-scatter factors (hereafter called S(h)), which are important for evaluating the output of the photon beam of the MM50 and MM22, were measured using a mini-phantom and build-up cap. S(h) measured with the build-up cap showed the influence of contaminated electrons, whereas S(h) measured with the mini-phantom showed less influence, even for 50 MV photon beams. Compared with the MM22, the MM50 showed less change in S(h) according to field size and energy. The reason for this seemed to be that the MM50 has a smaller extra-focal region than other accelerators equipped with flattening filters and, therefore, can essentially be considered a point source by using the beam-scanning method without a flattening filter. This study demonstrated that photons scattered by the flattening filter used for beam flattening in typical medical accelerators mainly contribute to S(h).