An End-to-end Quality Assurance Procedure for Ethos Online Adaptive Radiotherapy.

PURPOSE

Online adaptive radiation therapy (OART) poses unique challenges for quality assurance (QA), requiring innovative methodologies beyond traditional techniques. This study introduced an end-to-end (E2E) QA test for the Ethos OART system.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Initial treatment plans were developed using deformed computed tomography (CT) images of standard phantoms. During treatment sessions, adaptive plans were created and delivered using undistorted physical QA phantoms equipped with measuring detectors. Our approach was demonstrated using standard QA phantoms - OCTAVIUS-four-dimensional (PTW, Freiburg, Germany), ArcCHECK (Sun Nuclear Corp., FL, USA), and the RUBY (PTW, Freiburg, Germany) - to evaluate the accuracy of contouring, synthetic CT (sCT), and dosimetry of adaptive plans in the Ethos OART system.

RESULTS

Our findings demonstrated the superior performance of the Ethos OART system, with a gamma pass rate exceeding 96% (2% local/2 mm) and point dose deviations below 0.5%. The Dice coefficients for body contours between the sCT and reference CT were above 0.9, and the sCT accuracy was confirmed by mean absolute errors of <27 Hounsfield unit.

CONCLUSION

This approach establishes a straightforward E2E test to assess the workflow accuracies essential for preclinical validation/monthly QA of OART systems.