Commissioning kilovoltage cone-beam CT beams in a radiation therapy treatment planning system

The feasibility of accounting of the dose from kilovoltage cone-beam CT in treatment planning has been discussed previously for a single cone-beam CT (CBCT) beam from one manufacturer. Modeling the beams and computing the dose from the full set of beams produced by a kilovoltage cone-beam CT system requires extensive beam data collection and verification, and is the purpose of this work. The beams generated by Elekta X-ray volume imaging (XVI) kilovoltage CBCT (kV CBCT) system for various cassettes and filters have been modeled in the Philips Pinnacle treatment planning system (TPS) and used to compute dose to stack and anthropomorphic phantoms. The results were then compared to measurements made using thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs) and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The agreement between modeled and measured depth-dose and cross profiles is within 2% at depths beyond 1 cm for depth-dose curves, and for regions within the beam (excluding penumbra) for cross profiles. The agreements between TPS-calculated doses, TLD measurements, and Monte Carlo simulations are generally within 5% in the stack phantom and 10% in the anthropomorphic phantom, with larger variations observed for some of the measurement/calculation points. Dose computation using modeled beams is reasonably accurate, except for regions that include bony anatomy. Inclusion of this dose in treatment plans can lead to more accurate dose prediction, especially when the doses to organs at risk are of importance.