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Published on: February 6, 2019
Patient-specific quality assurance for prostate cancer patients receiving spot scanning proton therapy using
X Ronald Zhu1, Falk Poenisch, Xiaofei Song
1Department of Radiation Physics, University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA. xrzhu@mdanderson.org
Purpose:
To describe our experiences with patient-specific quality assurance (QA) for patients with prostate cancer receiving spot scanning proton therapy (SSPT) using single-field uniform dose (SFUD).
Methods And Materials:
The first group of 249 patients with prostate cancer treated with SSPT using SFUD was included in this work. The scanning-beam planning target volume and number of monitor units were recorded and checked for consistency. Patient-specific dosimetric measurements were performed, including the point dose for each plan, depth doses, and two-dimensional (2D) dose distribution in the planes perpendicular to the incident beam direction for each field at multiple depths. The γ-index with 3% dose or 3-mm distance agreement criteria was used to evaluate the 2D dose distributions.
Results:
We observed a linear relationship between the number of monitor units and scanning-beam planning target volume. The difference between the measured and calculated point doses (mean ± SD) was 0.0% ± 0.7% (range, -2.9% to 1.8%). In general, the depth doses exhibited good agreement except at the distal end of the spread-out Bragg peak. The pass rate of γ-index (mean ± SD) for 2D dose comparison was 96.2% ± 2.6% (range, 90-100%). Discrepancies between the measured and calculated dose distributions primarily resulted from the limitation of the model used by the treatment planning system.
Conclusions:
We have established a patient-specific QA program for prostate cancer patients receiving SSPT using SFUD.
