Quality assurance (QA) of the multileaf collimator (MLC) is a critical step for the delivery of intensity modulated radiation therapy treatment plan. While QA procedures for motor-driven MLC have been published extensively, those for binary MLCs such as the one used for helical tomotherapy have not been presented in the literature, as this is still a fairly new technology. In this study, seven ...

Quality assurance (QA) and risk management (RM) programs are intended to improve patient care, meet accreditation standards, and ensure compliance with liability insurance policies. The purpose of this project was to obtain and disseminate information on whether dental schools integrate QA and RM and what mechanisms have been most effective in measuring accomplishments in these programs. All si...

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA) is often performed using a 2D device and compares measured and computed fluence maps to determine if a field passes or fails certain dose and position criteria. The effects of a measured deviation to the 3D patient spatial dosimetry and dose volume histogram (DVH) are largely unknown because they cannot be analyzed using commer...

Molecular genetic analysis of families with haemophilia and other inherited bleeding disorders is now a common laboratory investigation. In contrast to phenotypic testing in which strict quality control is adhered to, in haemophilia molecular genetic testing there has been a lack of any external quality assurance schemes. In 1998 the UK National External Quality Assessment Scheme (UK NEQAS) est...

Usability and cognitive workload (CWL) are multidimensional constructs that describe user experience, predict performance, inform system design. The relationship between the subjective measures of these has not been adequately explored, especially in healthcare delivery settings where suboptimal usability electronic health records CWL professionals among major contributing factors to medical er...

Assessing and improving the quality of health care was, until recently, a low priority, both for policy makers in developing countries, and for technical agencies. The authors review the reasons for this long neglect of quality of care, which include: (i) a perceived priority of extending coverage at the expense of quality; (ii) the view that quality is difficult to assess in the absence of rel...

Quality assurance (QA) tasks, such as testing, profiling, and performance evaluation, have historically been done in-house on developergenerated workloads and regression suites. Since this approach is inadequate for many systems, tools and processes are being developed to improve software quality by increasing user participation in the QA process. A limitation of these approaches is that they f...

Helical tomotherapy is a relatively new modality with integrated treatment planning and delivery hardware for radiation therapy treatments. In view of the uniqueness of the hardware design of the helical tomotherapy unit and its implications in routine quality assurance, the Therapy Physics Committee of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine commissioned Task Group 148 to review thi...