TH-A-M100E-01: Introduction To: Quality Assurance for Advanced RT Technologies-The Challenge for RT Clinical Trials

Abstract

We as medical physicists have a crucial role to play in ensuring that all patients on radiotherapy protocols are treated comparably. Without this comparability, the validity of outcome results from the pooled patient data may be jeopardized. Advances in radiation therapy technology and delivery techniques have naturally led to the desire to incorporate such new tools into clinical trials, yet standardized quality assurance (QA) procedures are not fully developed and widely practiced. Although several task groups within the AAPM have been formed to set standards for QA for these new technologies, a major challenge is to conduct clinical trials that involve both the old and new technologies without overwhelming individual physicists with additional testing. National and international multi‐institutional clinical trials uniquely challenge the medical physics community to maintain comparability while at the same time requiring or permitting patient treatments that incorporate advanced technologies such as IMRT, image guided radiotherapy,imagefusion, and other techniques. The AAPM Working Group on Clinical Trials presents this continuing education symposium in order to discuss the efforts underway to design QA methods for advanced radiotherapy technologies especially in the context of clinical trials with the intent to address the issue of comparability and standardization of protocol data. We will present the work of Task Group 113, an important player in these efforts, on providing guidance as to physics practice standards for QA for radiotherapy clinical trials. The task group's recommendations on QA procedures and reporting methods are intended to facilitate highly consistent protocol treatments and data submission. The Working Group on clinical trials has identified several topics that pose significant challenges with respect to consistency of physics practices: dose calculations with heterogeneity corrections, localization verification, imagefusion techniques, and the treatment of moving targets. In this course, the history and the current state of the art will be described for each topic. The discussion about these areas should be of interest whether or not one is involved in clinical trials. Learning objectives for the entire CE course: 1. Understand the quality assurance issues facing Medical Physicists using advanced technologies and how these relate to clinical trial data validity. 2. Learn what Task Group 113 is doing to address the accuracy and consistency of data we send to quality assurance review centers. 3. Understand the problems and potential solutions to controversies in quality assurance measures for imagefusion, target motion, patient localization, and heterogeneity corrections.