ArticleJournal of applied clinical medical physics2023
Sensitivity and specificity of secondary dose calculation for head and neck treatment plans.
Article in Journal of applied clinical medical physics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 3 citations in OpenAlex.
- Complementary roles of GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo and ArcCHECK in TomoTherapy quality assurance.Physical and engineering sciences in medicine · 2026Article
- Dosimetric evaluation in Helical TomoTherapy for lung SBRT using Monte Carlo-based independent dose verification software.Journal of applied clinical medical physics · 2024Article
- Sensitivity and specificity of secondary dose calculation for head and neck treatment plans.Journal of applied clinical medical physics · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeSecondary dose calculation (SDC) with an independent algorithm is one option to perform plan-specific quality assurance (QA). While measurement-based QA can potentially detect errors in plan delivery, the dose values are typically only compared to calculations on homogeneous phantom geometries instead of patient CT data. We analyzed the sensitivity and specificity of an SDC software by purposely introducing different errors and determined thresholds for optimal decisions.
methodsThirty head and neck VMAT plans and 30 modifications of those plans, including errors related to density and beam modelling, were recalculated using RadCalc with a Monte Carlo algorithm. Decision thresholds were obtained by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis. For comparison, measurement-based QA using the ArcCHECK phantom was carried out and evaluated in the same way.
resultsDespite optimized decision thresholds, none of the systems was able to reliably detect all errors. ArcCHECK analysis using a 2%/2 mm criterion with a threshold of 91.1% had an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.80. Evaluating differences in recalculated and planned DVH parameter of the target structures in RadCalc with a 2% threshold an AUC of 0.86 was achieved. Out-of-field deviations could be attributed to weaknesses in the beam model.
conclusionsSecondary dose calculation with RadCalc is an alternative to established measurement-based phantom QA. Different tools catch different errors; therefore, a combination of approaches should be preferred.
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