Impact of bowel space contouring variability on radiation dose and volume assessments in treatment planning for gynaecologic cancers.

INTRODUCTION

Correlations between radiation dose/volume measures and small bowel (SB) toxicity are inconsistent in the medical literature. We assessed the impact of inter-provider variation in bowel bag contouring technique on estimates of radiation dose received by the SB during pelvic radiotherapy.

METHODS

Ten radiation oncologists contoured rectum, bladder and bowel bags on treatment planning computed tomography (CT) scans of two patients receiving adjuvant radiation for endometrial cancer. A radiation plan was generated for each patient and used to determine the radiation dose/volume for each organ. Kappa statistics were applied to assess the inter-provider contouring agreement, and Levene test evaluated the homogeneity of variance for radiation dose/volume metrics, including the V (cm ).

RESULTS

The bowel bag showed greater variation in radiation dose/volume estimates compared to the bladder and rectum. The V ranged from 163 to 384 cm for data set A and 109 to 409 cm for dataset B. Kappa values were 0.82/0.83, 0.92/0.92 and 0.94/0.86 for the bowel bag, rectum, and bladder on data sets A/B, demonstrating lower inter-provider agreement for bowel bag compared with bladder and rectum.

CONCLUSION

Inter-provider contouring variability is more significant for the bowel bag than the rectum and bladder, with an associated greater variability in dose and volume estimates during radiation planning.