A Dosimetric Comparison of Double Arc Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy with Large Field Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy for Head and Neck Cancer

Background: This Study Evaluate two state of Art techniques, Rapid Arc and large-field sliding window IMRT in terms of dosimetric end points and delivery time for head and neck cancer. Materials and Methods: 22 patients with head and neck cancer were selected for a planning comparative study. All patients went to CT-simulation in supine position. PTVs were delineated for two dose level of prescription 70 Gy to the boost-PTV70Gy and 54 Gy to the elective-PTV54Gy in 35 equal fraction/day. Simultaneous Integrated Boost (SIB) technique plan was generated for all patients and optimized with both techniques, Rapid Arc and IMRT with similar planning objectives. Dose of all plans of both techniques were calculated for 6MV photon using AAA implemented in Eclipse treatment planning system (10.0.39) with calculating grid size of 2.5 mm. Results: Comparison of Rapid Arc and IMRT plans in every patient showed significantly higher conformity index (CI95%) (p = 0.021) and sparing of the all OARs with Rapid Arc. The average homogeneity Index (HI95%) of lower prescribed dose target PTV54Gy which is in proximity to Higher dose prescribed target PTV70Gy was improved significantly with rapid Arc (p = 0.0001). D1% of spinal cord dose reduced significantly (p = 0.047) with Rapid Arc and the average mean dose of both left-parotid (21.26 ± 8.5 Gy), right-parotid (22.37 ± 7.44 Gy) were received lesser than with IMRT (22.78 ± 11.2 Gy and 24.1 ± 7.96 Gy) respectively. A significantly less monitor unit (MU) was required to deliver the plan (p < 0.00001) with significantly lesser treatment time (p < 0.00001). Conclusion: Rapid Arc technique was superior to IMRT in sparing the OARs without compromising target coverage and delivered the plan with lesser monitor unit and treatment time. Corresponding author.