Rotating and static sources for gamma knife radiosurgery systems: Monte Carlo studies

Rotating gamma systems (RGSs), GammaART-6000™, and its Chinese equivalents, such as OUR and MASEP, etc., are new radiosurgery systems that use rotating ⁶⁰Co sources instead of the 201 static sources (Leksell gamma knife, LGK). The rotating sources of RGSs simulate an infinite number of beams and promote extremely high target to surface dose ratios. However, the results of Monte Carlo in this study shows that RGS variants (modeled as having the same latitude angles, source to focus distance, and the distance from the source to the end of the collimator as the LGK) have smaller beam profile penumbra in the z direction, while LGK has smaller penumbra in the x and y directions. The differences are more significant in using larger collimators. © 2006 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.