Abstract
Purpose:Multiple error pathways can lead to delivery errors during the treatment course that cannot be caught with pre‐treatment QA. While in vivo solutions are being developed for linacs, no such solution exists for tomotherapy. The purpose of this study is to develop a near real‐time system for tomotherapy that can monitor the delivery and dose accumulation process during the treatment‐delivery, which enable the user to assess the impact of delivery variations and/or errors and to interrupt the treatment if necessary.Methods:A program running on a tomotherapy planning station fetches the raw DAS data during treatment. Exit detector data is extracted as well as output, gantry angle, and other machine parameters. For each sample, the MLC open‐close state is determined. The delivered plan is compared with the original plan via a Monte Carlo dose engine which transports fluence deviations from a pre‐treatment Monte Carlo run. A report containing the difference in fluence, dose and DVH statistics is created in html format. This process is repeated until the treatment is completed.Results:Since we only need to compute the dose for the difference in fluence for a few projections each time, dose with 2% statistical uncertainty can be computed in less than 1 second on a 4‐core cpu. However, the current bottleneck in this near real‐time system is the repeated fetching and processing the growing DAS data file throughout the delivery. The frame rate drops from 10Hz at the beginning of treatment to 5Hz after 3 minutes and to 2Hz after 10 minutes.Conclusion:A during‐treatment delivery monitor system has been built to monitor tomotherapy treatments. The system improves patient safety by allowing operators to assess the delivery variations and errors during treatment delivery and adopt appropriate actions.
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