The most suitable person to establish quality assurance guidelines for the generation and use of noncommercial clinical software is a medical physicist

摘要

Noncommercial software is widely used in radiation therapy, especially in academic centers. Such software can take many forms, ranging from MU-check spreadsheets; to in-house built treatment planning and plan-evaluation systems; or to public domain codes such as EGSnrc or MNCP that are interfaced to IMRT planning systems. This noncommercial software is usually written by in-house medical physicists and, thus, the question arises as to how to establish the integrity of the software they have written. One view has been that only software professionals are properly equipped to provide quality-assurance guidance on the generation and use of such software. An opposing view is that the medical physicists themselves are in the best position to determine effective practices to address software quality in their community, and this is the premise debated in this month's Point/Counterpoint.