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Sci—Thur PM: Planning & Delivery ‐ 01: Software for plan quality control
Author(s) -
La Russa D,
Taylor R,
Henderson E,
Lekx K,
Mason D
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.4894981
Subject(s) - tomotherapy , software , computer science , consistency (knowledge bases) , plan (archaeology) , software engineering , process (computing) , quality assurance , medical physics , radiation treatment planning , database , operating system , medicine , operations management , radiation therapy , engineering , artificial intelligence , external quality assessment , archaeology , history
The evaluation of treatment plans for compliance with prescribed treatment objectives is often a manual process that is susceptible to errors or omissions arising from non‐standardized procedures, time constraints or human factors. In an effort to improve the consistency and accuracy of this process we have developed software that automates the comparison between patient dose‐volume histograms (DVH) and pre‐defined dosimetric constraints. Treatment objectives and constraints (i.e. careplans) are stored in a database, categorized by disease site. Constraints have optional soft and hard limits which can be either modified or overridden on a per‐patient basis at the discretion of the clinician. Configurable plugins automate the import of patient DVH data from the treatment planning system (currently supporting Monaco, XiO, and TomoTherapy). An optional report summarizing the results of a comparison can be generated for inclusion in the patient treatment record. Results from each comparison are stored in a database enabling the analysis of program wide care plan compliance, average or mean doses to critical organs, or other values of interest. The software is run on a centralized server and accessed by users through any modern web browser. It will be released as free, open source software in the near future.