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Program Information

An Automatic Self-Customizable Tool to Analyze the Dosimetric Quality of a Radiation Therapy Plan


J Lian

J Lian1*, B Chera1, R Liu2, H Song3, K Burkhardt1, S Chang1, (1) The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC,(2) Robert Boissoneault Oncology Institute, Ocala, FL, (3) Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC

SU-E-T-717 Sunday 3:00PM - 6:00PM Room: Exhibit Hall

Purpose:
The review of radiation therapy plan is a crucial step for the quality control. It can be time consuming when many anatomic structures are involved and plan needs multiple revisions. The purpose of this work is to develop a real time, automatic and self-customizable tool to evaluate the dosimetric quality against the protocol. This will improve the efficiency of plan design and review and reduce the human error.

Methods:
We developed a software tool to import DVH, evaluate the dosimetric quality and export the QA report. Current version handles the DVH formats of three main treatment planning softwares (Eclipse, Varian; Pinnacle, Philips; TomoTherapy, Accuray). A rule language is created to describe the type of dosimetric constraints such as the percentage volume of percentage dose and etc. The protocol is written in ASCII format which allows the easy modification and the creation of a new one. The name of center, protocol, radiation oncologist and planner are in an editable configuration file. All of these design features make the tool easily customized to fulfill the protocols and report format of individual treatment center. Structure association between the protocol and clinic plan is programmed to be automatic as well. 12 patients and 3 protocols were used in the test of the software.

Results:
The dosimetric report generated with the new software tool agrees with the report manually produced. Three protocols, head and neck, lung and prostate, were used by the software with no error. Program associated 70% structures correctly between the standard names in the protocol and operator defined- names in the clinical plan.

Conclusion:
We developed an automatic dosimetric quality evaluation tool to improve the efficiency of plan design and review. It allows the users to customize their dosimetric protocol and report format without the need of changing the software.


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