Migration check tool: automatic plan verification following treatment management systems upgrade and database migration

Software upgrades of the treatment management system (TMS) sometimes require that all data be migrated from one version of the database to another. It is necessary to verify that the data are correctly migrated to assure patient safety. It is impossible to verify by hand the thousands of parameters that go into each patient's radiation therapy treatment plan. Repeating pretreatment QA is costly, time-consuming, and may be inadequate in detecting errors that are introduced during the migration. In this work we investigate the use of an automatic Plan Comparison Tool to verify that plan data have been correctly migrated to a new version of a TMS database from an older version. We developed software to query and compare treatment plans between different versions of the TMS. The same plan in the two TMS systems are translated into an XML schema. A plan comparison module takes the two XML schemas as input and reports any differences in parameters between the two versions of the same plan by applying a schema mapping. A console application is used to query the database to obtain a list of active or in-preparation plans to be tested. It then runs in batch mode to compare all the plans, and a report of success or failure of the comparison is saved for review. This software tool was used as part of software upgrade and database migration from Varian's Aria 8.9 to Aria 11 TMS. Parameters were compared for 358 treatment plans in 89 minutes. This direct comparison of all plan parameters in the migrated TMS against the previous TMS surpasses current QA methods that relied on repeating pretreatment QA measurements or labor-intensive and fallible hand comparisons.