Essay On Bolus

In radiation therapy, bolus is a modality that helps compensate for differences in body contours, stop skin sparring, and to raise dose buildup on the patient’s skin (Washington, p. 171). Bolus is a tissue equivalent material, but there is not just one type of bolus. Superflab is a commercial bolus that most clinical sites use, but other bolus variations are also available for use. There is no study that compares Superflab, neon green Play-Doh, orange Play-Doh, and uncooked rice for providing maximum dose buildup, also known as Dmax. The purpose of the study is to close the informational gap between the use of Superflab and these alternative bolus materials. In radiation therapy, many components go into each patient’s care. For some treatments, bolus use improves the outcome of treatment results. One of the main functions of bolus is to raise surface dose, which causes the dose to be closer to the skin. …show more content…
One experiment included post-mastectomy patients, which studied the effect of frequency of bolus on skin dose. Researchers proved that skin dose significantly increased with increased bolus frequency (Andic et al., 2009). Most clinics used the commercial bolus material, Superflab, but researchers started to search for alternatives to bolus. One set of researchers compared the use of Superflab and Aquaplast and concluded that Aquaplast could be an effective bolus and that it might even be better because of Aquaplast’s ability to be custom made to fit almost any body shape (Hsu, 2008). Others conducted an experiment to compare the depth dose curve results between Superflab and Play-Doh. They found both Play-Doh and Superflab were both within 1% of plastic water in the Percentage Depth Dose curve (Kahler, Shi, West, and Nguyen,