Conformal radiotherapy helps to deliver an accurate and effective cancer treatment by exactly targeting the tumor. In this purpose, softwares of the treatment planning system (TPS) compute every geometric parameters of the treatment. It is essential to control the quality of them because the TPS performances are directly connected with the precision on the treated region. The standard method to control them is to use physical test objects (PTOs).^{1, 2} The use of PTOs introduces uncertainties in the quality assessment because of the CT scan. Another method to assess the quality of these softwares is to use digital test objects (DTOs).^3-5 DTOs are exactly known in a continuous and a discrete way. Thus the assessment of the TPS quality can be more accurate and faster. The fact that the DTO characteristics are well known allows to calculate a theoretical result. The comparison of the TPS and this theoretical results leads to a quantitative assessment of the TPS softwares quality. This work presents the control of major quality criteria of digitally reconstructed radiograph (DRR) computation: ray divergence, ray incidence and spatial resolution. Fully automated methods to control these points have been developed. The same criteria have been tested with PTO and the quality assessments by the two methods have been compared. The DTO methods appeared to be much more accurate because computable.

Date Published: 28 March 2007
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6510, Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging, 65104J (28 March 2007);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6510:
Medical Imaging 2007: Physics of Medical Imaging
Jiang Hsieh; Michael J. Flynn, Editor(s)