Discrete and continuous description of a three-dimensional scene for quality control of radiotherapy treatment planning systems

摘要

Quality Control (QC) procedures are mandatory to achieve accuracy in radiotherapy treatments. For that purpose, classical methods generally use physical phantoms that are acquired by the system in place of the patient. In this paper, the use of digital test objects (DTO) replace the actual acquisition1. A DTO is a 3D scene description composed of simple and complex shapes from which discrete descriptions can be obtained. For QC needs, both the DICOM format (for Treatment Planning System (TPS) inputs) as well as continuous descriptions are required. The aim of this work is to define an equivalence model between a continuous description of the three dimensional (3D) scene used to define the DTO, and the DTO characteristics. The purpose is to have an XML-DTO description in order to compute discrete calculations from a continuous description. The defined structure allows also to obtain the three dimensional matrix of the DTO and then the series of slices stored in the DICOM format. Thus, it is shown how possibly design DTO for quality control in CT simulation and dosimetry.