A computer method for radiation treatment planning

Automatic computation methods were first developed and applied to the problem of radiation therapy treatment planning by the Physics staff at Memorial Hospital and Sloan-Kettering Institute in 1954 and reported in 1955 [1]. The field of radiation from a single port was stored as a matrix in a library of punched cards, and a sorter and accounting machine were used to combine various fields for rotation, cycling and multi-port therapy. This system was in continuous routine use from then until 1961, when the equipment was replaced by a Bendix G15-D digital computer. Subsequent work by Sterling [2] followed essentially the same method of describing the radiation field as used by the Physics staff at Memorial Hospital [1], except that more powerful equipment has been used. An analytic expression for the dose distribution produced by rotation had been previously applied successfully in 1951 to treatment planning with high-energy X-rays [3].

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