Program Information

Comparison of Different Commercial MU Verification Software in Terms of Accuracy and Performance

R McKinsey*, Y Qiu, S Stathakis, C Esquivel, N Papanikolaou, P Mavroidis, University of Texas HSC SA, San Antonio, TX

SU-E-T-6 Sunday 3:00PM - 6:00PM Room: Exhibit Hall

Purpose: All radiation therapy departments have a need for a quick and accurate verification of their treatment plans ranging from conventional, brachytherapy, to IMRT. The aim of this study is to perform an inter-comparison of different commercially available Monitor Unit (MU) secondary/independent software.

Methods: In this study, four independent MU verification software were examined (IMSure, DIAMOND, MuCheck, and Radcalc) as quality assurance tools for RTP systems. An inter-comparison of the treatment plans of 13 patients was performed using those MU verification software. All the plans were generated using the Pinnacle v9.2 treatment planning system. The treatment techniques include VMAT, MLC-based step-and-shoot IMRT and Conventional Conformal plans for different treatment sites (breast, head and neck, chest, pelvis, abdomen, and brain). The parameters that had to be adjusted after importing the treatment plans into the different software were the average SSD and effective depth.

Results: The average percent differences between the MUs provided by the Pinnacle and the RadCalc, ImSure and DIAMOND software were found to be -1.7%, -1.9% and 3.4%, respectively. The variation of the percent differences among the individual patients were 2.9% (-7.2 - 2.5), 3.7% (-7.2 - 3.7) and 7.0% (-9.9 - 16.2) for RadCalc, ImSure and DIAMOND, respectively.

Conclusion: Importing the files from the Pinnacle RTP system was equally easy for all the software. It was found that Radcalc was the software that required the minimum changes/interventions when inserting the average SSD and effective depth. However, the Radcalc was the slower among the examined software in computing the MUs of the different beams for the VMAT technique. Overall, the variation of the MU calculations between the examined software was found to be very similar indicating that their ability to be used as quality assurance tools of the calculations provided by the RTP systems is equivalent.

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