Title
Shape memory alloy (SMA)-based head and neck immobilizer for radiotherapy
Abstract
Head-and-neck cancer is often treated with intensive irradiation focused on the tumor, while delivering the minimum amount of irradiation to normal cells. Since a course of radiotherapy can take 5–6 weeks or more, the repeatability of the patient posture and the fastening method during treatment are important determinants of the success of radiotherapy. Many devices have been developed to minimize positional discrepancies, but all of the commercial devices used in clinical practice are operated manually and require customized fixtures for each patient. This is inefficient and the performance of the fixture device depends on the operator׳s skill. Therefore, this study developed an automated head-and-neck immobilizer that can be used during radiotherapy and evaluated the positioning reproducibility in a phantom experiment. To eliminate interference caused by the magnetic field from computed tomography hardware, Ni−Ti shape-memory alloy wires were used as the actuating elements of the fixtures. The resulting positional discrepancy was less than 5 mm for all positions, which is acceptable for radiotherapy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.jcde.2015.03.004
Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Radiotherapy,Shape memory alloy,Immobilizer,Head and neck cancer,Prototype
SMA*,Biomedical engineering,Reproducibility,Fixture,Clinical Practice,Imaging phantom,Radiation therapy,Computed tomography,Shape-memory alloy,Engineering
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2
3
2288-4300
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hyun-Taek Lee100.34
Sung-In Kim211.36
Jong Min Park361.06
Jin-Ho Kim446944.48
Dae-Seob Song500.34
Hyung-Il Kim600.68
Hong-Gyun Wu700.34
Sung-Hoon Ahn86515.09