Comparison of semiautomated tangential VMAT with 3DCRT for breast or chest wall and regional nodes.

Comparison of semiautomated tangential VMAT with 3DCRT for breast or chest wall and regional nodes. J Appl Clin Med Phys. 2018 Aug 19;: Authors: Byrne M, Archibald-Heeren B, Hu Y, Fong A, Chong L, Teh A Abstract Radiotherapy to the breast after surgery sometimes requires adjoining nodes to be included in the treatment volume. In these cases, the traditional approach has been a complex 3-Dimensional Conformal Radiotherapy (3DCRT) beam arrangement which can result in significant dose heterogeneity at the beam junctions. A Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) beam arrangement has previously been proposed for breast cases, where the chest wall/breast is treated with a limited angle (partial arc) tangential VMAT technique (Virén et al. [2015] Radiat Oncol. 10:79). In our study, this approach is extended to breast and chest wall cases with adjoining nodes by adding a separate conventional VMAT arc field specifically limited to the superior nodes. This VMAT method was implemented using a semiautomated approach on 27 patients, and the resultant plan compared to a monoisocentric 3DCRT plan. Plan statistics, Dose-Volume Histogram (DVH) analysis and Radiation Oncologist (RO) preference were assessed. When compared to the 3DCRT technique, the VMAT planning method was found to result in better target volume coverage, high doses to organs at risk (OAR) were reduced but greater OAR volumes received low doses. Having said that, the volume recei...
Source: Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: J Appl Clin Med Phys Source Type: research