Application of a Comprehensive Treatment Planning Test for Credentialing Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy and RapidArc in a TrueBeam Linear Accelerator Setup

Abstract

An extended version of task group report (TG)-119 dosimetric tests was introduced and tested on the TrueBeam linear accelerator setup. Treatment plan results and quality assurance (QA) results of RapidArc (RA) and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) were compared to understand the limitation and efficacy of the RA and IMRT system of the linear accelerator. Test structure sets were drawn on OCTAVIUS four-dimensional (4D) phantom computed tomography scan data for this study. We generated treatment plans based on the specified goal in the Eclipse™ treatment planning system using RA and IMRT in the study phantom. We used the same planning objectives for RA and IMRT techniques. Planar dose verification was performed using electronic portal imaging device and OCTAVIUS 4D phantom. The treatment log file was further analyzed using Pylinac (V2.4.0 (Open Source Code library available on Github, runs under Python programming language)) to compare the dosimetric outcome of RA and IMRT. Dose to the planning target volume (PTV) 1–5 and organ at risk (OAR) were analyzed in this study for the efficiency comparison of RA and IMRT. The primary objective was accomplished by adhering to the dose constraints associated with PTV 2 and the OAR. RA and IMRT also met the secondary objective. The tertiary goal of dose delivery to PTV 4 was met with RA but not IMRT. This study can be utilized to compare different institutions’ planning and patient-specific QA (PSQA) procedures. The findings of this study were in line with the published works of the literature. A multi-institutional planning and delivery accuracy audit can be built using this structure and set of planning objectives having similar PSQA phantom. The TG-119 report incorporated test challenges that were combined in a single study set and a single plan. This reduces the complexity of performing the original TG-119 tests, whereas keeping the challenges as introduced in the TG-119 report. This study’s planning and dosimetric results could be further utilized for dosimetry audit with any institute having a linear accelerator and OCTAVIUS 4D phantom for PSQA.