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The Medical Physics Practice Guideline (MPPG) for Commissioning and QA of External Beam Treatment Planning System (TPS) Dose Calculations includes recommendations to validate the dose for IMRT/VMAT/helical delivery plans through comparison of the individual beams and/or composite measurements with TPS calculations. In addition, the MPPG recommends the establishment of a routine QA program that validates dose calculation consistency through recalculation of reference plans for photon and electron beams. The MPPG has provided six sample datasets (DICOM CT and RT Structure Sets) that are available for users to download.
Plans should be developed using a dose calculation method that accounts for tissue heterogeneities in primary and scatter interactions (e.g., Convolution/Superposition, Monte Carlo, or grid-based Boltzmann transport equation solvers). The following datasets are available and include a PDF of sample objectives that can be used for optimization and prescription.
Dose calculation consistency can be performed by re-calculating a subset of the IMRT/VMAT datasets provided above and by using the following dataset for simple photon and electron fields.