Accurate estimation of daily delivered radiotherapy dose with an external treatment planning system.

Abstract

Accurate estimation of the daily radiotherapy dose is challenging in a multi-institutional collaboration when the institution specific treatment planning system (TPS) is not available. We developed and evaluated a method to tackle this problem. Residual errors in daily estimations were minimized with single correction based on the planned dose. For nine patients, medians of the absolute estimation errors for targets and OARs were less than 0.2 Gy ( D mean ), 0.3 Gy ( D 1 ), and 0.1 Gy ( D 99 ). In general, mimicking errors were significantly smaller than dose differences caused by anatomical changes. The demonstrated accuracy may facilitate dose accumulation in a multi-institutional/multi-vendor setting.