THE QUALITY INDICATORS TO ASSESS THE PROSTATE CANCER RADIOTHERAPY PERFORMANCE (BRIEF REVIEW)

Abstract

The radiation therapy (RT) plays a tremendous role in the consistent treatment of prostate cancer (PCa). The research ideas underpinning the wide implementation of innovative digitalized continuous (nonstop) dynamic auditing are coming true. Simultaneously, there are increasing challenges in selection of RT quality indicators. to study the pivotal indicators for RT quality assurance in treatment of PCa and to highlight the breaking through developments securing the delivery of top-quality cancer care in radiation oncology units. The literature search was performed in the PubMed database and the Google system. The inquiries included such terms as: "quality of care", "quality assessment criteria", "indicators", "prostate cancer" and "radiation therapy". A logical and semantic approaches were applicated to select the relevant scientific resources. In most relevant studies, the variations of the Delphi technique are used to choose the quality assessment criteria. The targeted research papers describe the development of QIs for assessing the quality of radiation therapy in patients with locally advanced PCa; a hierarchical list of QIs has been generated. The adequate registration of information has huge impact on quality assessment to draw the definitive thorough conclusions. The further improvement of Delphi technique may form one of pillars for the development of valuable RT quality measures. Considering the math aspects and the physical nature of RT, it seems being important to include the key opinion leaders in the field of clinical oncoinformatics, radiation informatics, and specialists from technical industries in the expert committees for the selection of RT QIs.