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UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF PHYSICS Guest
2024-11-24 11:38 |
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Conference: Bucharest University Faculty of Physics 2021 Meeting
Section: Biophysics; Medical Physics
Title:
Annual quality assurance tests for medical linear accelerators
Authors:
Tia POPESCU, Cristina PETROIU
Affiliation:
MNT Healthcare - Neolife
E-mail
tiap20@yahoo.com
Keywords:
Quality Assurance; Linear Accelerator;
Abstract:
In the last few years an uprising attention was pointed towards the treatment quality of oncologic patients, keeping in mind that every patient deserves to receive the best treatment suited in order to obtain the cure, the long term control of the tumor or the palliation. This aspect became more and more achievable with the technological advance regarding the equipment used for treatment or even the devices used for the verification of the treatment. Keeping this in mind, it is necessary the introduction of a quality assurance program in every radiotherapy department, so that trough verifications, the patient will receive the best care.
This quality assurance can be defined by the totality of test and procedures, so that the delivery of the treatment to respect the prescribed dose and also to achieve the adequate and reproducible distribution of dose in the target volume. A quality assurance program contains a series of tests performed on the treatment equipment, whose frequency is given by the importance of that parameter or the way in which the analyzed parameter is fluctuating in time.
At the reception of a new device or after a serious intervention that implies modification of the known parameters, it is necessary to establish the baseline values for every parameter that has to be verified. The main purpose of the quality assurance program is that the functioning of the linear accelerator, or its parameters, do not deviate significantly from the reference values obtained during the commissioning or acceptance. This is very important because the majority of the tested parameters are used in the treatment planning system in order to calculate the dose delivered patients.
In order to avoid any significant errors, those tests should be simple, fast and reproducible. For this purpose, in the past years the development of specialized devices for quality control has expanded, according to the general recommendation of TG-40, so that the tests are performed in a more efficient manner. Also, it is recommended that the measuring devices should detect the changes smaller than the tolerance levels of the analyzed parameter.
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