OBJECTIVE: In treatment techniques such as dynamic arc, the manual verification of treatment planning system calculations is very difficult. In these cases, the use of computational tools is useful and becomes an essential component of the quality assurance program. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A worksheet-based software has been created to perform an independent dose or monitor unit calculation in treatments applying the dynamic arc technique delivered with micromultileaf collimator. The dose values calculated per arc and per complete treatment, are compared with values obtained from BrainScan v5.3 treatment planning system. The software has been tested with 229 dynamic arc fields representing 42 skull treatments. From these 229 fields, 109 have been calculated in 3D reconstruction of patients CT images, 109 in reconstruction of polymethylmetacrylate phantom images, and 21 in reconstruction of images from a water equivalent phantom. RESULTS: The mean difference of total doses found in the 42 treatments (composites of one or more dynamic arcs), between the verification software and the treatment planning system, was of +1.73% with a 0.76% standard deviation. The maximum difference was 3.32% and the minimum -0.20%. When the 229 dynamic arcs were tested one by one, the average difference found was 1.61% with a 1.04% standard deviation. Maximum and minimum differences were, respectively 4.01% and -2.04%. As a result of the test, in 80.35% the doses calculated have presented a ± 2.5% difference in relation to the doses generated by the planning system. CONCLUSION: The software presented in this study is recommended for checking point dose included in treatment plans as an integral part of the process of quality assurance in radiotherapy and stereotactic radiosurgery when the dynamic arc technique is utilized in treatment with micromultileaf collimator, where a manual calculation is very difficult or even impracticable due the technique complexity.
Radiotherapy; Stereotactic radiosurgery; Linac; Quality assurance in radiotherapy; Monitor unit calculation; Micromultileaf collimator
