Purpose:
To describe the dosimetric commissioning and quality assurance (QA) of the actively scanned proton and carbon ion beams at the Italian National Center for Oncological Hadrontherapy.
Methods:
...The laterally integrated depth‐dose‐distributions (IDDs) were acquired with the PTW Peakfinder, a variable depth water column, equipped with two Bragg peak ionization chambers. fluka Monte Carlo code was used to generate the energy libraries, the IDDs in water, and the fragment spectra for carbon beams. EBT3 films were used for spot size measurements, beam position over the scan field, and homogeneity in 2D‐fields. Beam monitor calibration was performed in terms of number of particles per monitor unit using both a Farmer‐type and an Advanced Markus ionization chamber. The beam position at the isocenter, beam monitor calibration curve, dose constancy in the center of the spread‐out‐Bragg‐peak, dose homogeneity in 2D‐fields, beam energy, spot size, and spot position over the scan field are all checked on a daily basis for both protons and carbon ions and on all beam lines.
Results:
The simulated IDDs showed an excellent agreement with the measured experimental curves. The measured full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the pencil beam in air at the isocenter was energy‐dependent for both particle species: in particular, for protons, the spot size ranged from 0.7 to 2.2 cm. For carbon ions, two sets of spot size are available: FWHM ranged from 0.4 to 0.8 cm (for the smaller spot size) and from 0.8 to 1.1 cm (for the larger one). The spot position was accurate to within ±1 mm over the whole 20 × 20 cm2 scan field; homogeneity in a uniform squared field was within ±5% for both particle types at any energy. QA results exceeding tolerance levels were rarely found. In the reporting period, the machine downtime was around 6%, of which 4.5% was due to planned maintenance shutdowns.
Conclusions:
After successful dosimetric beam commissioning, quality assurance measurements performed during a 24‐month period show very stable beam characteristics, which are therefore suitable for performing safe and accurate patient treatments.
Ion beam therapy is a rapidly growing technique for tumor radiation therapy. Ions allow for a high dose deposition in the tumor region, while sparing the surrounding healthy tissue. For this reason, ...the highest possible accuracy in the calculation of dose and its spatial distribution is required in treatment planning. On one hand, commonly used treatment planning software solutions adopt a simplified beam-body interaction model by remapping pre-calculated dose distributions into a 3D water-equivalent representation of the patient morphology. On the other hand, Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, which explicitly take into account all the details in the interaction of particles with human tissues, are considered to be the most reliable tool to address the complexity of mixed field irradiation in a heterogeneous environment. However, full MC calculations are not routinely used in clinical practice because they typically demand substantial computational resources. Therefore MC simulations are usually only used to check treatment plans for a restricted number of difficult cases. The advent of general-purpose programming GPU cards prompted the development of trimmed-down MC-based dose engines which can significantly reduce the time needed to recalculate a treatment plan with respect to standard MC codes in CPU hardware. In this work, we report on the development of fred, a new MC simulation platform for treatment planning in ion beam therapy. The code can transport particles through a 3D voxel grid using a class II MC algorithm. Both primary and secondary particles are tracked and their energy deposition is scored along the trajectory. Effective models for particle-medium interaction have been implemented, balancing accuracy in dose deposition with computational cost. Currently, the most refined module is the transport of proton beams in water: single pencil beam dose-depth distributions obtained with fred agree with those produced by standard MC codes within 1-2% of the Bragg peak in the therapeutic energy range. A comparison with measurements taken at the CNAO treatment center shows that the lateral dose tails are reproduced within 2% in the field size factor test up to 20 cm. The tracing kernel can run on GPU hardware, achieving 10 million primary s−1 on a single card. This performance allows one to recalculate a proton treatment plan at 1% of the total particles in just a few minutes.
In the field of radiotherapy, Monte Carlo (MC) particle transport calculations are recognized for their superior accuracy in predicting dose and fluence distributions in patient geometries compared ...to analytical algorithms which are generally used for treatment planning due to their shorter execution times. In this work, a newly developed MC-based treatment planning (MCTP) tool for proton therapy is proposed to support treatment planning studies and research applications. It allows for single-field and simultaneous multiple-field optimization in realistic treatment scenarios and is based on the MC code FLUKA. Relative biological effectiveness (RBE)-weighted dose is optimized either with the common approach using a constant RBE of 1.1 or using a variable RBE according to radiobiological input tables. A validated reimplementation of the local effect model was used in this work to generate radiobiological input tables. Examples of treatment plans in water phantoms and in patient-CT geometries together with an experimental dosimetric validation of the plans are presented for clinical treatment parameters as used at the Italian National Center for Oncological Hadron Therapy. To conclude, a versatile MCTP tool for proton therapy was developed and validated for realistic patient treatment scenarios against dosimetric measurements and commercial analytical TP calculations. It is aimed to be used in future for research and to support treatment planning at state-of-the-art ion beam therapy facilities.
•The European Particle Therapy Network aims at providing consensual guidelines for robustness evaluation of proton therapy treatments.•According to modified Delphi consensus methodology, a systematic ...review is first required.•Many robustness evaluation methodologies have been reported in literature.•For the sites studied in this review, there is some harmonization for robustness parameters related to setup and range.•However, this consistency may reflect software limitations rather than an optimal approach.
Compared to conventional radiotherapy using X-rays, proton therapy, in principle, allows better conformity of the dose distribution to target volumes, at the cost of greater sensitivity to physical, anatomical, and positioning uncertainties. Robust planning, both in terms of plan optimization and evaluation, has gained high visibility in publications on the subject and is part of clinical practice in many centers. However, there is currently no consensus on the methods and parameters to be used for robust optimization or robustness evaluation. We propose to overcome this deficiency by following the modified Delphi consensus method. This method first requires a systematic review of the literature. We performed this review using the PubMed and Web Of Science databases, via two different experts. Potential conflicts were resolved by a third expert. We then explored the different methods before focusing on clinical studies that evaluate robustness on a significant number of patients. Many robustness assessment methods are proposed in the literature. Some are more successful than others and their implementation varies between centers. Moreover, they are not all statistically or mathematically equivalent. The most sophisticated and rigorous methods have seen more limited application due to the difficulty of their implementation and their lack of widespread availability.
Highlights • A systematic characterization of Lynx® for proton and carbon ion beams is presented. • Single spot and scanned beam characterization results against EBT3 films are shown. • Real time ...analysis allows time sparing in daily quality assurance procedures.
During one year of clinical activity at the Italian National Center for Oncological Hadron Therapy 31 patients were treated with actively scanned proton beams. Results of patient-specific quality ...assurance procedures are presented here which assess the accuracy of a three-dimensional dose verification technique with the simultaneous use of multiple small-volume ionization chambers. To investigate critical cases of major deviations between treatment planning system (TPS) calculated and measured data points, a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation tool was implemented for plan verification in water. Starting from MC results, the impact of dose calculation, dose delivery and measurement set-up uncertainties on plan verification results was analyzed. All resulting patient-specific quality checks were within the acceptance threshold, which was set at 5% for both mean deviation between measured and calculated doses and standard deviation. The mean deviation between TPS dose calculation and measurement was less than ±3% in 86% of the cases. When all three sources of uncertainty were accounted for, simulated data sets showed a high level of agreement, with mean and maximum absolute deviation lower than 2.5% and 5%, respectively.
Within the dosimetric characterization of particle beams, laterally-integrated depth-dose-distributions (IDDs) are measured and provided to the treatment planning system (TPS) for beam modeling or ...used as a benchmark for Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The purpose of this work is the evaluation, in terms of ion recombination and polarity effect, of the dosimetric correction to be applied to proton and carbon ion curves as a function of linear energy transfer (LET). LET was calculated with a MC code for selected IDDs. Several regions of Bragg peak (BP) curve were investigated. The charge was measured with the plane-parallel BP-ionization chamber mounted in the Peakfinder as a field detector, by delivering a fixed number of particles at the maximum flux. The dose rate dependence was evaluated for different flux levels. The chamber was connected to an electrometer and exposed to un-scanned pencil beams. For each measurement the chamber was supplied with {±400, +200, +100} V. Recombination and polarity correction factors were then calculated as a function of depth and LET in water. Three energies representative of the clinical range were investigated for both particle types. The corrected IDDs (IDDks) were then compared against MC. Recombination correction factors were LET and energy dependent, ranging from 1.000 to 1.040 (±0.5%) for carbon ions, while nearly negligible for protons. Moreover, no corrections need to be applied due to polarity effect being <0.5% along the whole IDDs for both particle types. IDDks showed a better agreement than uncorrected curves when compared to MC, with a reduction of the mean absolute variation from 1.2% to 0.9%. The aforementioned correction factors were estimated and applied along the IDDs, showing an improved agreement against MC. Results confirmed that corrections are not negligible for carbon ions, particularly around the BP region.
•CIRT is a good option for retreatment of inoperable recurrent salivary gland tumors.•GTV volume of retreated tumors might significantly influence local control.•For the future we aim to further ...escalate the CIRT retreatment dose.•Our data might be of interest for other particle therapy facilities in operation.
To report oncologic and functional outcomes in terms of tumor control and toxicity of carbon ion radiotherapy (CIRT) in reirradiation setting for recurrent salivary gland tumors at CNAO.
From November 2013 to September 2016, 51 consecutive patients with inoperable recurrent salivary gland tumors were retreated with CIRT in the frame of the phase II protocol CNAO S14/2012C for recurrent head and neck tumors.
Majority of pts (74.5%) had adenoid cystic carcinoma, mainly rcT4a (51%) and rcT4b (37%). Median dose of prior photon based radiotherapy was 60 Gy. Median dose of CIRT was 60 Gy RBE at a mean of 3 Gy RBE per fraction. During reirradiation, 19 patients (37.3%) experienced grade G1 toxicity, 19 pts (37.3%) had G2 and 2 pts (3.9%) had G3. Median follow up time was 19 months. Twenty one (41.2%) patients had stable disease and 30 (58.8%) tumor progression at the time of last follow up. Furthermore, 9 (18%) patients had G1 late toxicity, 19 (37%) had G2 and 9 (17. 5%) had G3. Using the Kaplan Meier method, progression free survival (actuarial) at one and two years were 71.7% and 52.2% respectively. Estimated overall survival (actuarial) at one and two years were 90.2% and 64%, respectively.
CIRT is a good option for retreatment of inoperable recurrent salivary gland tumors with acceptable rates of acute and late toxicity. Longer follow up time is needed to assess the effectiveness of CIRT in reirradiation setting of salivary gland tumors.
. Respiration negatively affects the outcome of a radiation therapy treatment, with potentially severe effects especially in particle therapy (PT). If compensation strategies are not applied, ...accuracy cannot be achieved. To support the clinical practice based on 4D computed tomography (CT), 4D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisitions can be exploited. The purpose of this study was to validate a method for virtual 4DCT generation from 4DMRI data for lung cancers on a porcine lung phantom, and to apply it to lung cancer patients in PT.
. Deformable image registration was used to register each respiratory phase of the 4DMRI to a reference phase. Then, a static 3DCT was registered to this reference MR image set, and the virtual 4DCT was generated by warping the registered CT according to previously obtained deformation fields. The method was validated on a physical phantom for which a ground truth 4DCT was available and tested on lung tumor patients, treated with gated PT at end-exhale, by comparing the virtual 4DCT with a re-evaluation 4DCT. The geometric and dosimetric evaluation was performed for both proton and carbon ion treatment plans.
. The phantom validation exhibited a geometrical accuracy within the maximum resolution of the MRI and mean dose deviations, with respect to the prescription dose, up to 3.2% for target
, with a mean gamma pass rate of 98%. For patients, the virtual and re-evaluation 4DCTs showed good correspondence, with errors on target
up to 2% within the gating window. For one patient, dose variations up to 10% at end-exhale were observed due to relevant inter-fraction anatomo-pathological changes that occurred between the planning and re-evaluation CTs.
. Results obtained on phantom data showed that the virtual 4DCT method was accurate, allowing its application on patient data for testing within a clinical scenario.
The calculation algorithm of a modern treatment planning system for ion-beam radiotherapy should ideally be able to deal with different ion species (e.g. protons and carbon ions), to provide relative ...biological effectiveness (RBE) evaluations and to describe different beam lines. In this work we propose a new approach for ion irradiation outcomes computations, the beamlet superposition (BS) model, which satisfies these requirements. This model applies and extends the concepts of previous fluence-weighted pencil-beam algorithms to quantities of radiobiological interest other than dose, i.e. RBE- and LET-related quantities. It describes an ion beam through a beam-line specific, weighted superposition of universal beamlets. The universal physical and radiobiological irradiation effect of the beamlets on a representative set of water-like tissues is evaluated once, coupling the per-track information derived from FLUKA Monte Carlo simulations with the radiobiological effectiveness provided by the microdosimetric kinetic model and the local effect model. Thanks to an extension of the superposition concept, the beamlet irradiation action superposition is applicable for the evaluation of dose, RBE and LET distributions. The weight function for the beamlets superposition is derived from the beam phase space density at the patient entrance. A general beam model commissioning procedure is proposed, which has successfully been tested on the CNAO beam line. The BS model provides the evaluation of different irradiation quantities for different ions, the adaptability permitted by weight functions and the evaluation speed of analitical approaches. Benchmarking plans in simple geometries and clinical plans are shown to demonstrate the model capabilities.
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