Enabling Brachytherapy Cancer Treatment for Low Resource Settings

Demers, Aaron

Student Work

Enabling Brachytherapy Cancer Treatment for Low Resource Settings

Public Deposited

This paper continues the work of a previous paper looking into the importance, cost, and practicality of bringing HDR Brachytherapy to low resource settings. Finding that many cancer deaths in low resource settings were due to cancers treatable by brachytherapy. Then focusing on making an afterloader that was cheap, modular, and safe as well as easy to operate became the focus of the paper. Using off the shelf components, and simple open source designs would lower the price substantially. However, safety, trained personnel, maintenance, and shielding became concerns since they are very important to patient and staff health yet very expensive when compared to the afterloader itself. More work should be applied to this topic going forward to figure out ways to lower the cost in these other areas as much as possible, as brachytherapy could save many lives in low resource settings.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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