Feasibility of patient specific quality assurance for proton therapy based on independent dose calculation and predicted outcomes

Arturs Meijers*, Gabriel Guterres Marmitt, Kelvin Ng Wei Siang, Arjen van der Schaaf, Antje C Knopf, Johannes A Langendijk, Stefan Both

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)
117 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

PURPOSE: Patient specific quality assurance (PSQA) is required to verify the treatment delivery and the dose calculation by the treatment planning system (TPS). The objective of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility to substitute resource consuming measurement based PSQA (PSQAM) by independent dose recalculations (PSQAIDC), and that PSQAIDC results may be interpreted in a clinically relevant manner using normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) and tumor control probability (TCP) models.

METHODS AND MATERIALS: A platform for the automatic execution of the two following PSQAIDC workflows was implemented: (i) using the TPS generated plan and (ii) using treatment delivery log files (log-plan). 30 head and neck cancer (HNC) patients were retrospectively investigated. PSQAM results were compared with those from the two PSQAIDC workflows. TCP / NTCP variations between PSQAIDC and the initial TPS dose distributions were investigated. Additionally, for two example patients that showed low passing PSQAM results, eight error scenarios were simulated and verified via measurements and log-plan based calculations. For all error scenarios ΔTCP / NTCP values between the nominal and the log-plan dose were assessed.

RESULTS: Results of PSQAM and PSQAIDC from both implemented workflows agree within 2.7% in terms of gamma pass ratios. The verification of simulated error scenarios shows comparable trends between PSQAM and PSQAIDC. Based on the 30 investigated HNC patients, PSQAIDC observed dose deviations translate into a minor variation in NTCP values. As expected, TCP is critically related to observed dose deviations.

CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrated a feasibility to substitute PSQAM with PSQAIDC. In addition, we showed that PSQAIDC results can be interpreted in clinically more relevant manner, for instance using TCP / NTCP.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)136-141
Number of pages6
JournalRadiotherapy and Oncology
Volume150
Early online date21-Jun-2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept-2020

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