Additive manufacture of custom radiation dosimetry phantoms: An automated method compatible with commercial polymer 3D printers

There exist significant opportunities for the improvement of radiation therapy procedures by the development of custom dosimetry phantoms for training, quality assurance, and clinical research. Additive manufacture enables custom phantom manufacture, however there exist technical challenges, namely the lack of specialised materials to mimic radiation interaction properties of natural materials, and a lack of automated methods to reduce the manual effort required to convert medical scan data into an additive component. This work demonstrates a novel approach to overcome these challenges to enable the automated manufacture of customised radiation dosimetry phantoms using commercial ultraviolet cured printers. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.