Dose calculation for hypofractionated volumetric-modulated arc therapy: approximating continuous arc delivery and tongue-and-groove modeling*

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 p...

Source: Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics - March 8, 2016 Category: Physics Source Type: research