Conformal Radiation by Brachytherapy in Prostate Cancer: The Establishment of an RTOG 3-D Evaluation Center

摘要

There currently is no accepted credentialing or certification process for the many inexperienced clinicians beginning to perform Transperineal Interstitial Permanent Prostate Brachytherapy (TIPPB). The work being funded by this grant is designed to establish quality assurance (QA) guidelines for the conduct of TIPPB for the purpose of performing national, multi-institutional cooperative studies. The guidelines are intended to: (1) ensure that participating institutions have the proper equipment and appropriate procedures in place to administer TIPPB; (2) define a standard TIPPB data set to be submitted to the 3DQA Center for each treated patient to assess protocol compliance; (3) define an electronic data exchange mechanism for submission of each protocol patient's digital data set; and (4) establish a QA review process of the submitted data. Substantial progress has been made in establishing a methodology for electronic data exchange. A proposed credentialing process and QA guidelines have been developed. Work is in progress in modifying a CMS FOCUS 3DRTP system to serve as a TIPPB QA review station. Work will begin in the next funding period on the development of remote QA review tools and a national database for the TIPPB treatment planning data that can be linked with clinical outcome data.