In 2010, the NCS (Netherlands Commission on Radiation Dosimetry) installed a subcommittee to develop guidelines for quality assurance and control for volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) treatments. The report (published in 2015) has been written by Dutch medical physicists and has therefore, inevitably, a Dutch focus. This paper is a condensed version of these guidelines, the full report in...

Unlike other commercial treatment planning systems (TPS) which model the rounded leaf end differently (such as the MLC dosimetric leaf gap (DLG) or rounded leaf-tip radius), the RayStation TPS (RaySearch Laboratories, Stockholm, Sweden) models transmission through the rounded leaf end of the MLC with a step function, in which the radiation transmission through the leaf end is the square root of...

UNLABELLED The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a long tradition of supporting development of methodologies for national networks providing quality audits in radiotherapy. A series of co-ordinated research projects (CRPs) has been conducted by the IAEA since 1995 assisting national external audit groups developing national audit programs. The CRP 'Development of Quality Audits for ...

Purpose: Aim of this study is to clinically implement the COMPASS 3D dosimetry system for pretreatment quality assurance of volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT-RapidArc) treatment plans. Methods: For this study, 10 head and neck (H&N) and pelvis VMAT plans dose response from Linac was measured using COMPASS system along with MatriXXEvolution and 3D dose reconstructed in the patient computed ...

Brachytherapy plays an important role in the definitive treatment of cervical cancers by radiotherapy. In the present study, we investigated whether sliding-window intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) can achieve a pear-shaped distribution with a similar sharp dose falloff identical to that of brachytherapy. The computed tomography scans of a tandem and ovoid patient were pushed to both...

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) multicriteria optimization (MCO) algorithm clinically available in the RayStation treatment planning system (TPS) and its ability to reduce treatment planning time while providing high dosimetric plan quality. Nine patients with localized prostate cancer who were previously treated with 78 Gy in 39 fractions usi...

Entrance and exit doses are commonly measured in in vivo dosimetry for comparison with expected values, usually generated by the treatment planning system (TPS), to verify accuracy of treatment delivery. This report aims to evaluate the accuracy of six TPS algorithms in computing entrance and exit doses for a 6 MV beam. The algorithms tested were: pencil beam convolution (Eclipse PBC), analytic...

Background: Intracavitary brachytherapy plays a major role in management of cervical carcinoma. Assessment of dose received by OAR’s therefore becomes crucial for the estimation of radiation toxicities in HDR brachytherapy. Objective: Purpose of this study is to evaluate the role of in vivo dosimetry in HDR brachytherapy and to compare actual doses delivered to OAR’ s with those calculate...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether dose the skin surface underneath bolus, accurately predicted by a 3D treatment planning system (TPS) in patients receiving 50 Gy/25# postmastectomy radiotherapy (PMRT) using optically stimulated luminescent dosimetry (OSLD) for verification. In vivo OSLDs performed 20 consecutive PMRT. An array 9 were applied chest wall or neobreast grid arrange...

Radiation dermatitis during radiotherapy is correlated with skin dose and is a common clinical problem for head and neck and thoracic cancer patients. Therefore, accurate prediction of skin dose during treatment planning is clinically important. The objective of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of skin dose calculated by a commercial treatment planning system (TPS). We evaluated the accur...