Program Information
Validation of Hounsfield Unit-To-Stopping Power Ratio Calibration Used for Dose Calculation in Proton Radiotherapy
J Polf*, H Chung , K Langen , University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Presentations
SU-F-T-220 (Sunday, July 31, 2016) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall
Purpose: To validate the stoichiometric calibration of the Hounsfield Unit (HU) to Stopping Power Ratio (SPR) calibration used to commission a commercial treatment planning system (TPS) for proton radiotherapy dose calculation.
Methods and Materials: The water equivalent thickness (WET) of several individual pig tissues (lung, fat, muscle, liver, intestine, rib, femur), mixed tissue samples (muscle/rib, ice/femur, rib/air cavity/muscle), and an intact pig head were measured with a multi-layer ionization chamber (MLIC). A CT scan of each sample was obtained and imported into a commercial TPS. The WET calculated by the TPS for each tissue sample was compared to the measured WET value to determine the accuracy of the HU-to-SPR calibration curve used by the TPS to calculate dose.
Results: The WET values calculated by the TPS showed good agreement (< 2.0%) with the measured values for bone and all soft tissues except fat (3.1% difference). For the mixed tissue samples and the intact pig head measurements, the difference in the TPS and measured WET values all agreed to within 3.5%. In addition SPR values were calculated from the measured WET of each tissue, and compared to SPR values of reference tissues from ICRU 46 used to generate the HU-to-SPR calibration for the TPS.
Conclusions: For clinical scenarios where the beam passes through multiple tissue types and its path is dominated by soft tissues, we believe using an uncertainty of 3.5% of the planned beam range is acceptable to account for uncertainties in the TPS WET determination.
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