Abstract
Software upgrades of the treatment management system (TMS) sometimes require that all data be migrated from one version of the database to another. It is necessary to verify that the data are correctly migrated to assure patient safety. It is impossible to verify by hand the thousands of parameters that go into each patient's radiation therapy treatment plan. Repeating pretreatment QA is costly, time‐consuming, and may be inadequate in detecting errors that are introduced during the migration. In this work we investigate the use of an automatic Plan Comparison Tool to verify that plan data have been correctly migrated to a new version of a TMS database from an older version. We developed software to query and compare treatment plans between different versions of the TMS. The same plan in the two TMS systems are translated into an XML schema. A plan comparison module takes the two XML schemas as input and reports any differences in parameters between the two versions of the same plan by applying a schema mapping. A console application is used to query the database to obtain a list of active or in‐preparation plans to be tested. It then runs in batch mode to compare all the plans, and a report of success or failure of the comparison is saved for review. This software tool was used as part of software upgrade and database migration from Varian's Aria 8.9 to Aria 11 TMS. Parameters were compared for 358 treatment plans in 89 minutes. This direct comparison of all plan parameters in the migrated TMS against the previous TMS surpasses current QA methods that relied on repeating pretreatment QA measurements or labor‐intensive and fallible hand comparisons.PACS numbers: 87.55.T, 87.55.Qr
Highlights
Modern radiotherapy treatment management systems (TMS) use a large database running on a networked server to provide treatment plan information for delivery at the linear accelerators
Migration Check Tool (MCT) was used in conjunction with two separate software upgrades at The University of Michigan Radiation Oncology Department
The first upgrade was from Varian Medical Systems Aria 8.9 to Aria 11.0.5, which involved a database migration but a change in server software from Sybase to Microsoft structured query language (SQL) Server
Summary
Modern radiotherapy treatment management systems (TMS) use a large database running on a networked server to provide treatment plan information for delivery at the linear accelerators. In this work we describe a software tool for checking the parameters of a migrated treatment plan against the same plan before migration. In a previous upgrade in our clinic from Aria 7.4 to Aria 8.9, we chose to repeat the patient-specific pretreatment quality assurance measurements for patients under treatment at the time of upgrade to verify the integrity of the treatment plan data. This was approximately a day’s worth of effort and included verification of other patient parameters, such as the number of treatments and so on. The tool developed here was used in conjunction with a TMS upgrade and migration from Varian Medical Systems Aria 8.9 to Aria 11 and for a minor upgrade (Aria 11.0.5 to 11 MR1)
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