HDR quality assurance methods for personal digital assistants.

An important component of every clinical high-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy program is quality assurance (QA). One of the QA recommendations of the AAPM TG59 report is an independent verification on the results of treatment planning. It is desirable for the verification procedure to be as quick and easy to perform as possible and yet to have a high probability of detecting significant errors. The objective of this work is to describe the dosimetric methods and software developed to implement a departmental HDR QA program using personal digital assistants (PDAs). Verification of MammoSite treatment plans is presented as a practical example. PDAs that run the PalmOS were selected for their low cost and popularity among health care professionals. General-purpose applications were developed for linear sources, planar, and volume implants, that estimate the total dwell time of an HDR implant. This value can then be compared to the total dwell time calculated by the primary treatment planning system. The software incorporates the Paterson-Parker (PP) radium tables and the Greenfield-Tichman-Norman (GTN) version of the Quimby radium tables, which have been modified to a form more convenient for HDR calculations. A special purpose application based on the AAPM TG43 formalism was developed for the MammoSite breast applicator. For QA calculations perpendicular to the center of a single Iridium-192 (192I) HDR source, as exemplified by MammoSite treatments, linearly interpolating the PP or GTN tables is equivalent to applying the TG43 formalism at distances up to 5 cm from the source axis. The MammoSite-specific software also offers the option to calculate dosimetry based on the balloon volume. The PDA clock/calendar permits the software to automatically account for source decay. The touch-sensitive screen allows the familiar tabular format to be maintained while minimizing the effort required for calculations. The PP and GTN radium implant tables are easily modified to a form more convenient for HDR calculations. Deploying the HDR versions of the tables as PDA software makes general-purpose HDR QA effortless. For less conventional HDR applications such as MammoSite implants, a QA solution based on the TG43 formalism becomes practical when implemented on a small computer.