Differences in the Patterns of Failure Between IROC Lung and Spine Phantom Irradiations

Abstract

Purpose: Our purpose was to investigate and classify the reasons why institutions fail the Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core (IROC) stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) spine and moving lung phantoms, which are used to credential institutions for clinical trial participation.

Methods and materials: All IROC moving lung and SBRT spine phantom irradiation failures recorded from January 2012 to December 2018 were evaluated in this study. A failure was a case where the institution did not meet the established IROC criteria for agreement between planned and delivered dose. We analyzed the reports for all failing irradiations, including point dose disagreement, dose profiles, and gamma analyses. Classes of failure patterns were created and used to categorize each instance.

Results: There were 158 failing cases analyzed: 116 of 1052 total lung irradiations and 42 of 263 total spine irradiations. Seven categories were required to describe the lung phantom failures, whereas 4 were required for the spine. Types of errors present in both phantom groups included systematic dose and localization errors. Fifty percent of lung failures were due to a superior-inferior localization error, that is, error in the direction of major motion. Systematic dose errors, however, contributed to only 22% of lung failures. In contrast, the majority (60%) of spine phantom failures were due to systematic dose errors, with localization errors (in any direction) accounting for only 14% of failures.

Conclusions: There were 2 distinct patterns of failure between the IROC moving lung and SBRT spine phantoms. The majority of the lung phantom failures were due to localization errors, whereas the spine phantom failures were largely attributed to systematic dose errors. Both of these errors are clinically relevant and could manifest as errors in patient cases. These findings highlight the value of independent end-to-end dosimetry audits and can help guide the community in improving the quality of radiation therapy by focusing attention on where errors manifest in the community.