About EGS: The Future of EGS
The EGS Code System is now used by thousands of medical physics researchers to estimate how much energy from the medical accelerators is being deposited in cancer cells during radiotherapy. Maximizing dose to the tumor while minimizing dose to healthy tissues makes radiotherapy more effective, thus saving lives. This sub-field of medical physics is called radiotherapy treatment planning and the use of EGS is widely accepted in this field as the most accurate method for doing calculations involving electrons and photons.
EGS is also finding use in a wide variety of medical and biological fields:
- Determining dose distributions from radionuclides used in radioimmunotherapy (monoclonal antibody studies).
- Modeling the Compton effect and attenuation in reconstructed images of brain-blood flow.
- Calculating organ doses received during fluoroscopic examinations.
- Subsurface imaging of agricultural produce with x-rays.
- Defining accurate Iridium-wire implant dosimetry.
- Improving Iodine-125 (and other) brachytherapy methods.
- Tracing the movement of beta emitters after injection into arthritic joints.
- Designing accelerator targets, field-flattening compensators, jaws and other devices used with clinical accelerators.
- Calculating dose distributions in CAT-scan slices of the body.
- Designing methods used in stereotactic surgery.
- Simulating silicon microstrip mammography.
- Calculating the production of radioisotopes (radionuclides) by electron accelerators.
- Simulating PET and SPECT systems to define intrinsic limitations.
- Studying space radiation effects.
- Developing ion chamber correction factors in radiation dosimetry.
Since 1985, the focus on low-energy improvements to EGS have directly benefited the high-energy community. Calorimetry, for example, requires measuring electron-photon showers until the radiation is greatly degraded in energy. Using an EGS option developed by Alex F Bielajew (aka BLIF) and Dave Rogers called Parameter Reduced Electron-Step Transport Algorithm (PRESTA), physicists can now accurately simulate low energy electron transport. This has proved valuable in design of calorimeters.
More recently, a powerful application software package, based on EGS4 and referred to more simply as BEAM, is being used very successfully to characterize the radiation fields that emanate from the electron accelerators.
