A volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) approach to total body irradiation (TBI) has recently been introduced at our institution. The planning target volume (PTV) is divided into separate sub-volumes, each being treated with 2 arcs with their own isocentre. Pre-treatment quality assurance of beams is performed on a Sun Nuclear ArcCHECK diode array. Measurement of junction regions between VMAT...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential benefits of conformal radiotherapy (CRT) combined with a sequential volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) boost in the treatment of upper thoracic esophageal cancer. Ten patients with upper thoracic esophageal cancer previously treated with CRT plus a sequential VMAT boost plan were replanned with CRT plus an off-cord CRT boost plan an...

Treatment planning for volumetric arc therapy (VMAT) is a lengthy process that requires many rounds of optimizations to obtain the best treatment settings and optimization constraints for a given patient's geometry. We propose a feature-selection search engine that explores previously treated cases of similar anatomy, returning the optimal plan configurations and attainable DVH constraints. Usi...

BACKGROUND Radiotherapy is an important treatment of choice for breast cancer patients after breast- conserving surgery, and we compare the feasibility of using dual arc volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT2), single arc volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT1) and Multi-beam Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (M-IMRT) on patients after breast-conserving surgery. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty ...

Treatment of patients with multiple brain metastases using a single-isocenter volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) has been shown to decrease treatment time with the tradeoff of larger low dose to the normal brain tissue. We have developed an efficient Projection Summing Optimization Algorithm to optimize the treatment geometry in order to reduce dose to normal brain tissue for radiosurgery ...

BACKGROUND Recent studies suggest that radiation-induced injuries to the hippocampus play important roles in compromising neurocognitive functioning for patients with brain tumors and it could be important to spare the hippocampus using modern planning methods for patients with craniopharyngiomas. As bilateral hippocampus are located on the same level as the planning target volume (PTV) in pati...

BACKGROUND To assess the dosimetric effect induced by inter-observer variability in target definition for 3D-conformal RT (3DCRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy by RapidArc (RA) techniques for rectal cancer treatment. METHODS Ten patients with rectal cancer subjected to neo-adjuvant RT were randomly selected from the internal database. Four radiation oncologists independently contoured ...

Independent verification of complex treatment delivery with megavolt photon beam radiotherapy (RT) has been effectively used to detect and prevent errors. This work presents the validation and uncertainty analysis of a model that predicts 2D portal dose images (PDIs) without a patient or phantom in the beam. The prediction model is based on an exponential point dose model with separable primary...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to evaluate experimentally the accuracy of the dose calculation algorithm AcurosXB in small field highly modulated Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT). METHOD The 1000SRS detector array inserted in the rotational Octavius 4D phantom (PTW) was used for 3D dose verification of VMAT treatments characterized by small to very small targets. Clinical treatment ...

We investigated whether methods conventionally used to evaluate patient-specific QA in volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) for intracranial tumors detect clinically relevant dosimetric errors. VMAT plans with coplanar arcs were designed for 37 intracranial tumors. Dosimetric accuracy was validated by using a 3D array detector. Dose deviations between the measured and planned doses were eval...