Patient-Specific Quality Assurance Using Monte Carlo Dose Calculation and Elekta Log Files for Prostate Volumetric-Modulated Arc Therapy

Technol Cancer Res Treat. 2017 Dec;16(6):1220-1225. doi: 10.1177/1533034617745250. Epub 2017 Dec 5.

Abstract

Log file-based methods are attracting increasing interest owing to their ability to validate volumetric-modulated arc therapy outputs with high resolution in the leaf and gantry positions and in delivered dose. Cross-validation of these methods for comparison with measurement-based methods using the ionization chamber/ArcCHECK-3DVH software (version 3.2.0) under the same conditions of treatment anatomy and plan enables an efficient evaluation of this method. In this study, with the purpose of cross-validation, we evaluate the accuracy of a log file-based method using Elekta log files and an X-ray voxel Monte Carlo dose calculation technique in the case of leaf misalignment during prostate volumetric-modulated arc therapy. In this study, 10 prostate volumetric-modulated arc therapy plans were used. Systematic multileaf collimator leaf positional errors (±0.4 and ±0.8 mm for each single bank) were deliberately introduced into the optimized plans. Then, the delivered 3-dimensional doses to a phantom with a certain patient anatomy were estimated by our system. These doses were compared with the ionization chamber dose and the ArcCHECK-3DVH dose. For the given phantom and patient anatomy, the estimated dose strongly coincided with the ionization chamber/ArcCHECK-3DVH dose ( P < .01). In addition, good agreement between the estimated dose and the ionization chamber/ArcCHECK-3DVH dose was observed. The dose estimation accuracy of our system, which combines Elekta log files and X-ray voxel Monte Carlo dose calculation, was evaluated.

Keywords: Monte Carlo; log file; oncology; patient-specific QA; radiotherapy; volumetric-modulated arc therapy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Monte Carlo Method*
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / diagnostic imaging
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / radiotherapy*
  • Quality Assurance, Health Care* / methods
  • Radiotherapy Dosage*
  • Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-Assisted* / methods
  • Radiotherapy, Image-Guided
  • Radiotherapy, Intensity-Modulated* / methods
  • Reproducibility of Results