The use of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) has led to an increase in the number of complex fields that require measurement and comparison to calculated dose distributions in 2D. Current dose-evaluation techniques, including isodose line comparisons, displays of the dose difference between calculated and measured distributions, and distance-to-agreement (DTA) comparisons, are useful...

BACKGROUND An advantage of the Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) technique is the feasibility to deliver different therapeutic dose levels to PTVs in a single treatment session using the Simultaneous Integrated Boost (SIB) technique. The paper aims to describe an automated tool to calculate the dose to be delivered with the SIB-IMRT technique in different anatomical regions that have the ...

The recent development of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) allows the dose distribution to be tailored to match the tumour's shape and position, avoiding damage to healthy tissue to a greater extent than previously possible. Traditional treatment plans assume that the target structure remains in a fixed location throughout treatment. However, many studies have shown that because of ...

The quantitative comparison of two-dimensional dose distributions (e.g., calculated versus measured) has become a key issue in intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) QA. We proposed a new evaluation method referred to as modified dose difference (MDdiff) evaluation. Hereinafter, features and effectiveness of the MDdiff evaluation method will be described. In this work, the formalism of MDdiff ...

We consider Pareto surface based multi-criteria optimization for step and shoot IMRT planning. By analyzing two navigation algorithms, we show both theoretically and in practice that the number of plans needed to form convex combinations of plans during navigation can be kept small (much less than the theoretical maximum number needed in general, which is equal to the number of objectives for o...

Copyright: ß 2014 The PLOS ONE Staff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

There is a pressing need for clinically intuitive quality assurance methods that report metrics of relevance to the likely impact on tumor control of normal tissue injury. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into the accuracy of a novel "transform method" which enables a clinically relevant analysis through dose-volume-histograms (DVHs) and dose overlays on the patient's CT data. Th...

Inverse treatment planning for intensity-modulated radiotherapy may include time consuming, multiple minimizations of an objective function. In this paper, methods are presented to speed up the process of (repeated) minimization of the well-known quadratic dose objective function, extended with a smoothing term that ensures generation of clinically acceptable beam profiles. In between two subse...

BACKGROUND In general, the IMRT optimisation problem possesses many equivalent solutions. This makes it difficult to decide whether a result produced by an IMRT planning algorithm can be further improved, e.g. by adding more beams, or whether it is close to the globally best solution. RESULTS It is conjectured that the curvature properties of the objective function around any globally optimum...

Recently the compensator has been shown to be an in expensive and reliable dose delivery device for photon beam intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). The goal of IMRT compensator design is to produce an optimized primary fluence profile at the patient's surface obtained from the optimization procedure. In this paper some of the problems associated with IMRT compensator design, specifica...