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Program Information

Implementation of a Commercially-Available QA Database for Comprehensive QA in a Multi-Modality Radiotherapy Center


S George

S George*, J George , V Mishra , A Gutierrez , Miami Cancer Institute, Miami, FL

Presentations

SU-I-GPD-P-17 (Sunday, July 30, 2017) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall


Purpose: Establishing a consolidated quality assurance (QA) program in which physicists are able to create, review and approve tasks from a single platform poses its own unique challenges in a multi-modality environment. Many of the quality control (QC) procedures are not standardized across the treatment modalities and thus have to be customized according to different task group recommendation’s and state regulations. In light of this, the objective of this study was to utilize a commercially available software tool to develop a QA database in a radiotherapy center with the majority of currently available systems.

Methods: ATLAS software (Sun Nuclear Corporation) was employed for the development and execution of QA program and workflow. A QA program for the Varian linear accelerators were developed based on AAPM TG-142 & TG-179 guidelines. The Tomotherapy system employs tests and tolerances based on AAPM TG-148 while AAPM TG-135 recommendations were implemented for Cyberknife. TG-56 recommendations and TG-66 procedures were used to develop the QA program for High dose-rate and computed-tomography simulators, respectively. Templates were developed and customized for each machine by modifying their inbuilt modules.

Results: Organizing a QA protocol and maintaining a quality management program (QMP) for a multi-modality facility with multiple vendor machines in one database was made possible by appropriately extracting the guidelines from relevant TG reports. Daily and monthly QA’s for linacs, Cyberknife, Tomotherapy, HDR and CT simulators were established. The software allows for direct documentation and maintains all of the routine QA components such as safety, mechanical, imaging and dosimetry.

Conclusion: The ATLAS QA can be utilized to establish a QA database for a multi-modality radiotherapy center in which the database is easily access from any networked computer.


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