While a few physicists have designed new plan check automation solutions for their clinics, fewer, if any, managed to adapt existing solutions. As complex and varied as the systems they check, these programs must gain the full confidence of those who would run them on countless patient plans. The present automation effort, planCheck, therefore focuses on versatility and ease of implementation a...

A novel three-dimensional unicursal irradiation technique "Dynamic WaveArc" (DWA), which employs simultaneous and continuous gantry and O-ring rotation during dose delivery, has been implemented in Vero4DRT. The purposes of this study were to develop a commissioning and quality assurance procedure for DWA irradiation, and to assess the accuracy of the mechanical motion and dosimetric control of...

In volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) treatment delivery perfect beam symmetry is assumed by the planning system. This study aims to test this assumption and present a method of measuring time-resolved beam symmetry measurement during a VMAT delivery that includes extreme variations of dose rate and gantry speed. The Sun Nuclear IC Profiler in gantry mount was used to measure time-resolved...

Two quality control devices, light-field device and radiation-field device, have been specially designed to facilitate the clinical implementation of conformal dynamic arc treatment (CDAT) and intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). With the devices, the light field as well as the radiation field, projected from the individual beam at any treatment position (i.e. arbitrary gantry angle) c...

Helical tomotherapy (HT) is a novel treatment approach that combines Intensity-Modulate Radiation Therapy (IMRT) delivery with in-built image guidance using megavoltage (MV) CT scanning. The technique utilises a 6 MV linear accelerator mounted on a CT type ring gantry. The beam is collimated to a fan beam, which is intensity modulated using a binary multileaf collimator (MLC). As the patient ad...

Helical tomotherapy has been developed at the University of Wisconsin, and 'Hi-Art II' clinical machines are now commercially manufactured. At the core of each machine lies a ring-gantry-mounted short linear accelerator which generates x-rays that are collimated into a fan beam of intensity-modulated radiation by a binary multileaf, the modulation being variable with gantry angle. Patients are ...

minor repositioning errors in connection with sharp density gradients in the beam path or changes in the physical condition of the patient. To quantify such deviations from PET data, improved attenuation, scatter [2] and random [3] correction methods for the measured data as well as refined models (positron range, photon scattering) for predicting the β-activity distribution from the treatment ...

PURPOSE The verification method of the geometry agreement between a light field and/or a laser coordinate and treatment beam should be easy and quick. In this presentation, we propose a novel QA method by using both kV- and MV-CBCT for kV-IGRT system. This method confirms the temporal unchanging the agreement of geometry in the kV-IGRT system with the treatment beam geometry. METHODS 1) MV-fl...

Volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) has been shown to be able to deliver plans equivalent to intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) in a fraction of the treatment time. This improvement is important for patient immobilization/localization compliance due to comfort and treatment duration, as well as patient throughput. Previous authors have suggested commissioning methods for this moda...

The effect of gantry rotation on beam profiles of photon and electron beams is an important issue in quality assurance for radiotherapy. To address variations in the profiles of photon and electron beams at different gantry angles, a Dynamic Phantom scanner composed of a 20 x 12 x 6 cm3 scanning Lucite block was designed as a cross-beam-profile scanner. To our knowledge, differences between sca...