Treatment plan complexity metrics for predicting IMRT pre-treatment quality assurance results
- 9 May 2014
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Australasian Physics & Engineering Sciences in Medicine
- Vol. 37 (3), 475-482
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-014-0274-9
Abstract
The planning of IMRT treatments requires a compromise between dose conformity (complexity) and deliverability. This study investigates established and novel treatment complexity metrics for 122 IMRT beams from prostate treatment plans. The Treatment and Dose Assessor software was used to extract the necessary data from exported treatment plan files and calculate the metrics. For most of the metrics, there was strong overlap between the calculated values for plans that passed and failed their quality assurance (QA) tests. However, statistically significant variation between plans that passed and failed QA measurements was found for the established modulation index and for a novel metric describing the proportion of small apertures in each beam. The ‘small aperture score’ provided threshold values which successfully distinguished deliverable treatment plans from plans that did not pass QA, with a low false negative rate.Keywords
This publication has 22 references indexed in Scilit:
- Fractal analysis for assessing the level of modulation of IMRT fieldsMedical Physics, 2011
- Eight years of IMRT quality assurance with ionization chambers and film dosimetry: experience of the montpellier comprehensive cancer centerRadiation Oncology, 2011
- Assessing software upgrades, plan properties and patient geometry using intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) complexity metricsMedical Physics, 2011
- Inverse planning for IMRT with nonuniform beam profiles using total‐variation regularization (TVR)Medical Physics, 2010
- Comparison of simple and complex liver intensity modulated radiotherapyRadiation Oncology, 2010
- A new metric for assessing IMRT modulation complexity and plan deliverabilityMedical Physics, 2010
- What is an acceptably smoothed fluence? Dosimetric and delivery considerations for dynamic sliding window IMRTRadiation Oncology, 2007
- Intensity-modulated radiotherapy: current status and issues of interestInternational Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, 2001
- A gradient inverse planning algorithm with dose‐volume constraintsMedical Physics, 1998
- Methods of image reconstruction from projections applied to conformation radiotherapyPhysics in Medicine & Biology, 1990