Systematic survey of the dose enhancement in tissue-equivalent materials facing medium- and high-Z backscatterers exposed to X-rays with energies from 5 to 250 keV.
Abstract
The present study has been inspired by the results of earlier dose measurements in tissue-equivalent materials adjacent to thin foils of aluminum, copper, tin, gold, and lead. Large dose enhancements have been observed in low-Z materials near the interface when this ensemble was irradiated with X-rays of qualities known from diagnostic radiology. The excess doses have been attributed to photo-, Compton, and Auger electrons released from the metal surfaces. Correspondingly, high enhancements of biological effects have been observed in single cell layers arranged close to gold surfaces. The objective of the present work is to systematically survey, by calculation, the values of the dose enhancement in low-Z media facing backscattering materials with a variety of atomic numbers and over a large range of photon energies. Further parameters to be varied are the distance of the point of interest from the interface and the kind of the low-Z material. The voluminous calculations have been performed using the PHOTCOEF algorithm, a proven set of interpolation functions fitted to long-established Monte Carlo results, for primary photon energies between 5 and 250 keV and for atomic numbers varying over the periodic system up to Z = 100. The calculated results correlate well with our previous experimental results. It is shown that the values of the dose enhancement (a) vary strongly in dependence upon Z and photon energy; (b) have maxima in the energy region from 40 to 60 keV, determined…
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