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SU‐F‐T‐231: Improving the Efficiency of a Radiotherapy Peer‐Review System for Quality Assurance
Author(s) -
Hsu S,
Basavatia A,
Garg M,
Kalnicki S,
Tome W
Publication year - 2016
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 - 10.1118/1.4956370
Subject(s) - documentation , quality assurance , plan (archaeology) , tomotherapy , computer science , medical physics , benchmarking , radiation treatment planning , planner , software engineering , process management , operations management , medicine , artificial intelligence , radiation therapy , engineering , external quality assessment , archaeology , marketing , business , history , programming language
Purpose: To improve the efficiency of a radiotherapy peer‐review system using a commercially available software application for plan quality evaluation and documentation. Methods: A commercial application, FullAccess (Radialogica LLC, Version 1.4.4), was implemented in a Citrix platform for peer‐review process and patient documentation. This application can display images, isodose lines, and dose‐volume histograms and create plan reports for peer‐review process. Dose metrics in the report can also be benchmarked for plan quality evaluation. Site‐specific templates were generated based on departmental treatment planning policies and procedures for each disease site, which generally follow RTOG protocols as well as published prospective clinical trial data, including both conventional fractionation and hypo‐fractionation schema. Once a plan is ready for review, the planner exports the plan to FullAccess, applies the site‐specific template, and presents the report for plan review. The plan is still reviewed in the treatment planning system, as that is the legal record. Upon physician's approval of a plan, the plan is packaged for peer review with the plan report and dose metrics are saved to the database. Results: The reports show dose metrics of PTVs and critical organs for the plans and also indicate whether or not the metrics are within tolerance. Graphical results with green, yellow, and red lights are displayed of whether planning objectives have been met. In addition, benchmarking statistics are collected to see where the current plan falls compared to all historical plans on each metric. All physicians in peer review can easily verify constraints by these reports. Conclusion: We have demonstrated the improvement in a radiotherapy peer‐review system, which allows physicians to easily verify planning constraints for different disease sites and fractionation schema, allows for standardization in the clinic to ensure that departmental policies are maintained, and builds a comprehensive database for potential clinical outcome evaluation.