Program Information
Automated Plan Quality Assurance Integrated with Eclipse Using Varian's ESAPI Interface
E Schreibmann*, I Crocker , A Dhabaan , E Elder , Department of Radiation Oncology and Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University Atlanta, GA
Presentations
MO-FG-202-2 (Monday, August 1, 2016) 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM Room: 202
Purpose: Treatment plan compliance to physician’s intent is still assessed by hand in clinical practice by visually comparing prescription details against corresponding plan values. We report on a script that uses the Varian’s programming interface to automate the scoring of treatment plan dose values to the physician’s prescribed constraints.
Methods: The Eclipse Scripting Advance Programming Interface (ESAPI) is a FDA-approved scripting environment written in C# that allows programming access to a patient’s record in Aria and Eclipse. With the ESAPI, it is possible to create customized add-on software libraries that can be installed in the planning system as a pull-down menu item. We used the flexibility of ESAPI to parse plan quality metrics from the prescription and compare them automatically against the corresponding plan values. The script can check fractionation as well as minimum, mean and maximum doses to an organ specified in the prescription, DVHs metrics such as volume or dose coverage for both targets and critical organs, conformity indexes specific to radio surgery and biological indexes such as EUD, TCP and NCTP. Lists of generally accepted constraints limits, such as QUANTEC or clinical trials constraints are implemented in the script and can be invoked to automatically fill the prescription.
Results: The script interprets the prescription and compares plan quality indices parsed from it against the counterpart values extracted from the plan. A coloring scheming is employed to automatically mark with green, yellow or red plan quality metrics that meet, are borderline fail (10%) or fail the prescription criteria. While manually performing this task can take 30 minutes for a complex head and neck case with many constraints, the script takes approximately 1 minute.
Conclusion: The script provided easy to understand feedback on quality metrics in a simple and practical solution that significantly streamline plan double-checks in clinical practice.
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