This spring, clinical physicists at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto teamed up to develop and validate an efficient linear accelerator quality assurance protocol using the Integral Quality Monitor (IQM) System. The team presented their protocol as a poster at the Annual AAPM conference last month.
The clinical physics team designed a series of apertures as a multi-segment QA field to evaluate dosimetric constancy as a function of gantry and collimator angle as well as aperture position. The protocol was designed to satisfy TG-142 recommendations for photon beam output, symmetry, and flatness, as well as jaw position and dynamic leaf motion.
The Machine QA protocol designed for IQM complies with the measurement standards defined by TG-142 and was tested successfully with three different Varian TrueBeam linear accelerators at three institutions. The results were highly consistent among institutions and confirmed the protocol’s applicability to the TG-142 recommendations. All tests performed at the three centers demonstrate that IQM delivers an accurate dosimetric characterization of the linear accelerator.
IQM provides a highly efficient process for linear accelerator quality assurance and will allow the automation of these tests in the future. The team plans to extend the protocol to handle an even wider array of Machine QA tasks in the coming months. More information about the poster presentation can be found on the AAPM webpage or click here to download the poster.
QM opens a new dimension in Machine QA, allowing you to verify the accuracy of your linear accelerator like never before. Plan-based. With highest accuracy. Fully automatically in real-time.
Click here to learn why machine QA has never been simpler.