Dosimetric quality control of Eclipse treatment planning system using pelvic digital test object

摘要

Last year, we demonstrated the feasibility of a new method to perform dosimetric quality control of Treatment Planning Systems in radiotherapy [1], this method is based on Monte-Carlo simulations and uses anatomical Digital Test Objects (DTOs). The pelvic DTO was used in order to assess this new method on an ECLIPSE VARIAN Treatment Planning System. Large dose variations were observed particularly in air and bone equivalent material. In this current work, we discuss the results of the previous paper [1] and provide an explanation for observed dose differences, the VARIAN Eclipse (Anisotropic Analytical) algorithm was investigated. Monte Carlo simulations (MC) were performed with a PENELOPE code version 2003[2, 3]. To increase efficiency of MC simulations, we have used our parallelized version based on the standard MPI (Message Passing Interface). The parallel code has been run on a 32-processor SGI cluster. The study was carried out using pelvic DTOs and was performed for low- and high-energy photon beams (6 and 18MV) on 2100CD VARIAN linear accelerator. A square field (10x10 cm~2) was used. Assuming the MC data as reference, x index [4] analyze was carried out. For this study, a distance to agreement (DTA) was set to 7mm while the dose difference was set to 5% as recommended in the TRS-430 and TG-53 (on the beam axis in 3-D inhomogeneities) [5, 6]. When using Monte Carlo PENELOPE, the absorbed dose is computed to the medium, however the TPS computes dose to water [7, 8]. We have used the method described by Siebers et al. [7] based on Bragg-Gray cavity theory to convert MC simulated dose to medium to dose to water. Results show a strong consistency between ECLIPSE and MC calculations on the beam axis.