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Oral contrast agents lead to underestimation of dose calculation in volumetric-modulated arc therapy planning for pelvic irradiation.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:The effects of oral contrast agents (OCAs) on dosimetry have not been studied in detail. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the influence of OCAs on dose calculation in volumetric-modulated arc therapy plans for rectal cancer. METHODS:From 2008 to 2016, computed tomography (CT) images were obtained from 33 rectal cancer patients administered OCA with or without intravenous contrast agent (ICA) and 14 patients who received no contrast agent. CT numbers of organs at risk were recorded and converted to electronic densities. Volumetric-modulated arc therapy plans were designed before and after the original densities were replaced with non-enhanced densities. Doses to the planned target volume (PTV) and organs at risk were compared between the plans. RESULTS:OCA significantly increased the mean and maximum densities of the bowels, while the effects of ICA on these parameters depended on the blood supply of the organs. With OCA, the actual doses for PTV were significantly higher than planned and doses to the bowel increased significantly although moderately. However, the increase in the volume receiving a high-range doses was substantial (the absolute change of intestine volume receiving ?52 Gy: 1.46 [0.05-3.99, cubic centimeter range: -6.74 to 128.12], the absolute change of colon volume receiving ?50 Gy: 0.34 [0.01-1.53 cc, range: -0.08 to 3.80 cc]. Dose changes due to ICA were insignificant. Pearson correlation showed that dose changes were significantly correlated with a high intestinal volume within or near the PTV (? > 0.5, P? 0.3, P?

SUBMITTER: Jing H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7478501 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Oral contrast agents lead to underestimation of dose calculation in volumetric-modulated arc therapy planning for pelvic irradiation.

Jing Hao H Tian Yuan Y Tang Yu Y Wang Shu-Lian SL Jin Jing J Song Yong-Wen YW Liu Yue-Ping YP Fang Hui H Chen Bo B Qi Shu-Nan SN Tang Yuan Y Lu Ning-Ning NN Yang Yong Y Li Ning N Li Ye-Xiong YX

Chinese medical journal 20200901 17

<h4>Background</h4>The effects of oral contrast agents (OCAs) on dosimetry have not been studied in detail. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the influence of OCAs on dose calculation in volumetric-modulated arc therapy plans for rectal cancer.<h4>Methods</h4>From 2008 to 2016, computed tomography (CT) images were obtained from 33 rectal cancer patients administered OCA with or without intravenous contrast agent (ICA) and 14 patients who received no contrast agent. CT numbers of organs at r ...[more]

PMID: 32810050

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Project description:The purpose of this work is to evaluate the volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) multicriteria optimization (MCO) algorithm clinically available in the RayStation treatment planning system (TPS) and its ability to reduce treatment planning time while providing high dosimetric plan quality. Nine patients with localized prostate cancer who were previously treated with 78 Gy in 39 fractions using VMAT plans and rayArc system based on the direct machine parameter optimization (DMPO) algorithm were selected and replanned using the VMAT-MCO system. First, the dosimetric quality of the plans was evaluated using multiple conformity metrics that account for target coverage and sparing of healthy tissue, used in our departmental clinical protocols. The conformity and homogeneity index, number of monitor units, and treatment planning time for both modalities were assessed. Next, the effects of the technical plan parameters, such as constraint leaf motion CLM (cm/°) and maximum arc delivery time T (s), on the accuracy of delivered dose were evaluated using quality assurance passing rates (QAs) measured using the Delta4 phantom from ScandiDos. For the dosimetric plan's quality analysis, the results show that the VMAT-MCO system provides plans comparable to the rayArc system with no statistical difference for V95% (p < 0.01), D1% (p < 0.01), CI (p < 0.01), and HI (p < 0.01) of the PTV, bladder (p < 0.01), and rectum (p < 0.01) constraints, except for the femoral heads and healthy tissues, for which a dose reduction was observed using MCO compared with rayArc (p < 0.01). The technical parameter study showed that a combination of CLM equal to 0.5 cm/degree and a maximum delivery time of 72 s allowed the accurate delivery of the VMAT-MCO plan on the Elekta Versa HD linear accelerator. Planning evaluation and dosimetric measurements showed that VMAT-MCO can be used clinically with the advantage of enhanced planning process efficiency by reducing the treatment planning time without impairing dosimetric quality.

Project description:Hypofractionated treatments generally increase the complexity of a treatment plan due to the more stringent constraints of normal tissues and target coverage. As a result, treatment plans contain more modulated MLC motions that may require extra efforts for accurate dose calculation. This study explores methods to minimize the differences between in-house dose calculation and actual delivery of hypofractionated volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT), by focusing on arc approximation and tongue-and-groove (TG) modeling. For dose calculation, the continuous delivery arc is typically approximated by a series of static beams with an angular spacing of 2°. This causes significant error when there is large MLC movement from one beam to the next. While increasing the number of beams will minimize the dose error, calculation time will increase significantly. We propose a solution by inserting two additional apertures at each of the beam angle for dose calculation. These additional apertures were interpolated at two-thirds' degree before and after each beam. Effectively, there were a total of three MLC apertures at each beam angle, and the weighted average fluence from the three apertures was used for calculation. Because the number of beams was kept the same, calculation time was only increased by about 6%-8%. For a lung plan, areas of high local dose differences (> 4%) between film measurement and calculation with one aperture were significantly reduced in calculation with three apertures. Ion chamber measurement also showed similar results, where improvements were seen with calculations using additional apertures. Dose calculation accuracy was further improved for TG modeling by developing a sampling method for beam fluence matrix. Single element point sampling for fluence transmitted through MLC was used for our fluence matrix with 1 mm resolution. For Varian HDMLC, grid alignment can cause fluence sampling error. To correct this, transmission volume averaging was applied. For three paraspinal HDMLC cases, the average dose difference was greatly reduced in film and calculation comparisons with our new approach. The gamma (3%, 3 mm) pass rates have improved significantly from 74.1%, 90.0%, and 90.4% to 99.2%, 97.9%, and 97.3% for three cases, for calculation without volume averaging and calculation with volume averaging, respectively. Our results indicate that more accurate MLC leaf position and transmission sampling can improve accuracy and agreement between calculation and measurement, and are particularly important for hypofractionated VMAT that consists of large MLC movement.

Dataset Information

Oral contrast agents lead to underestimation of dose calculation in volumetric-modulated arc therapy planning for pelvic irradiation.

Publications

Oral contrast agents lead to underestimation of dose calculation in volumetric-modulated arc therapy planning for pelvic irradiation.

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