PURPOSE Volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) involves the simultaneous use of dynamic multileaf collimator (DMLC) techniques and gantry arcing; appropriate quality assurance is therefore required. This article describes the development and implementation of procedures for commissioning VMAT on a commercial linear accelerator (Elekta PreciseBeam VMAT with MLCi and Beam Modulator heads). MAT...

BACKGROUND Gated Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) is an emerging radiation therapy modality for treatment of tumors affected by respiratory motion. However, gating significantly prolongs the treatment time, as delivery is only activated during a single respiratory phase. To enhance the efficiency of gated VMAT delivery, a novel dual-gated VMAT (DG-VMAT) technique, in which delivery is ex...

Volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) plans may require more control points (or segments) than some of fixed-beam IMRT plans that are created with a limited number of segments. Increasing number of control points in a VMAT plan for a given prescription dose could create a large portion of the total number of segments with small number monitor units (MUs) per segment. The purpose of this study...

This work applied statistical process control to establish the control limits of the % gamma pass of patient-specific intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) quality assurance (QA), and to evaluate the efficiency of the QA process by using the process capability index (Cpml). A total of 278 IMRT QA plans in nasopharyngeal carcinoma were measured with ...

PURPOSE The authors propose a novel optimization model for volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) planning that directly optimizes deliverable leaf trajectories in the treatment plan optimization problem, and eliminates the need for a separate arc-sequencing step. METHODS In this model, a 360° arc is divided into a given number of arc segments in which the leaves move unidirectionally. This ...

Intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) are state-of-the-art irradiation techniques for the delivery of highly conformal radiation fields to the target volume. These techniques require complex treatment planning system (TPS) algorithms as well as sophisticated irradiation methods. As a result, the use of quality assurance tools for the verificati...

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) was recently introduced to the field of gynecologic malignancies; however, its value is not yet validated. A clinical trial is in preparation to investigate the efficacy and feasibility of IMRT for postoperative cervical cancer. The object of this study was to perform a surveillance study of IMRT for post-operative cervical cancer. A questionnaire re...

INTRODUCTION The primary aim of this study is to compare intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) to volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) for the radical treatment of prostate cancer using version 10.0 (v10.0) of Varian Medical Systems, RapidArc radiation oncology system. Particular focus was placed on plan quality and the implications on departmental resources. The secondary objective w...

In 2010, the NCS (Netherlands Commission on Radiation Dosimetry) installed a subcommittee to develop guidelines for quality assurance and control for volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) treatments. The report (published in 2015) has been written by Dutch medical physicists and has therefore, inevitably, a Dutch focus. This paper is a condensed version of these guidelines, the full report in...

PURPOSE To evaluate the dosimetric impacts of flattening filter-free (FFF) beams in intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) for sinonasal cancer. METHODS For fourteen cases, IMRT and VMAT planning was performed using 6-MV photon beams with both conventional flattened and FFF modes. The four types of plans were compared in terms of target dose homoge...