Program Information
Investigation of the Impact of Respiratory Motion On Spine SAbR Dose Distributions
R Foster*, C Ding , S Jiang , UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX
Presentations
SU-E-T-520 (Sunday, July 12, 2015) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall
Purpose:Spine SRS/SAbR treatment plans typically require very steep dose gradients to meet spinal cord constraints and it is crucial that the dose distribution be accurate. However, these plans are typically calculated on helical free-breathing CT scans, which often contain motion artifacts. While the spine itself doesn't exhibit very much intra-fraction motion, tissues around the spine, particularly the liver, do move with respiration. We investigated the dosimetric effect of liver motion on dose distributions calculated on helical free-breathing CT scans for spine SAbR delivered to the T and L spine.
Methods:We took 5 spine SAbR plans and used density overrides to simulate an average reconstruction CT image set, which would more closely represent the patient anatomy during treatment. The value used for the density override was 0.66 g/cc. All patients were planned using our standard beam arrangement, which consists of 13 coplanar step and shoot IMRT beams. The original plan was recalculated with the same MU on the “average” scan and target coverage and spinal cord dose were compared to the original plan.
Results:The average changes in minimum PTV dose, PTV coverage, max cord dose and volume of cord receiving 10 Gy were 0.6%, 0.8%, 0.3% and 4.4% (0.012 cc), respectively.
Conclusion:SAbR spine plans are surprisingly robust relative to surrounding organ motion due to respiration. Motion artifacts in helical planning CT scans do not cause clinically significant differences when these plans are re-calculated on pseudo-average CT reconstructions. This is likely due to the beam arrangement used because only three beams pass through the liver and only one beam passes completely through the density override. The effect of the respiratory motion on VMAT plans for spine SAbR is being evaluated.
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