Program Information
Using Dose Weighted Mean Effective Depth to Improve Accuracy of Secondary MU Calculation for VMAT Plans
h qu*, N Yu , P Qi , A Godley , P Xia , The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OH
Presentations
SU-F-T-277 (Sunday, July 31, 2016) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall
Purpose:
In commercial secondary dose calculation system, an average effective depth is used to calculate the Monitor Units for an arc beam from the volumetric modulated arc (VMAT) plans. Typically, an arithmetic mean of the effective depths (AMED) of a VMAT arc beam is used, which may result in large MU discrepancy from that of the primary treatment planning system. This study is to demonstrate the use of a dose weighted mean effective depth (DWED) can improve accuracy of MU calculation for the secondary MU verification.
Methods:
In-house scripts were written in the primary treatment planning system (TPS) to first convert a VMAT arc beam to a series of static step & shoot beams (every 4 degree). The computed dose and effective depth of each static beam were then used to obtain the dose weighted mean effective depth (DWED) for the VMAT beam. The DWED was used for the secondary MU calculation for VMAT plans. Six lung SBRT VMAT plans, eight head and neck VMAT plans and ten prostate VMAT plans that had > 5% MU deviations (failed MU verification) using the AMED method were recalculated with the DWED. For comparison, same number VMAT plans that had < 5% MU deviations (passed MU verification) using AMED method were also reevaluated with the dose weighted mean effective depth method.
Results:
For MU verification passed plans, the mean and standard deviation of MU differences between the TPS and the secondary calculation program were 2.2%±1.5% for the AMED and 2.1%±1.7% for the DMED method. For the failed plans, the mean and standard deviation of MU differences of TPS to the secondary calculation program were 9.9%±4.7% and 4.7%±2.6, respectively.
Conclusion:
The dose weighted mean effective depth improved MU calculation accuracy which can be used for the pre-treatment MU verification of VMAT plans.
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