Effects of spot size errors in DynamicARC pencil beam scanning proton therapy planning

Objective. Spot size stability is crucial in pencil beam scanning (PBS) proton therapy, and variations in spot size can disrupt dose distributions. Recently, a novel proton beam delivery method known as DynamicARC PBS scanning has been introduced. The current study investigates the dosimetric impact of spot size errors in DynamicARC proton therapy for head and neck (HNC), prostate, and lung cancers. Approach. Robustly optimized DynamicARC proton therapy plans were created for HNC (n = 4), prostate (n = 4), and lung (n = 4) cancer patients. Spot size errors of +/- 10%, +/- 15%, and +/- 20% were introduced, and their effects on target coverage ( D 95% and D 99% ), homogeneity index (HI), and organ-at-risk doses were analyzed across different cancer sites. Main Results. HNC and lung cancer plans showed greater vulnerability to spot size errors, with reductions in target coverage of up to 4.8% under - 20% spot size errors. Dose homogeneity was also more affected in these cases, with HI degrading by 0.12 in lung cancer. Prostate cancer demonstrated greater resilience to spot size variations, even under errors of +/- 20%. For spot size errors +/- 10%, the oral cavity, parotid glands, and constrictor muscles experienced D mean deviations within +/- 1.2%, while deviations were limited to +/- 0.5% for D 10% of the bladder and rectum and +/- 0.3% for V 20 Gy(RBE) of the lungs. The robustness analysis indicated that lung cancer plans were most susceptible to robustness reductions caused by spot size errors, while HNC plans demonstrated moderate sensitivity. Conversely, prostate cancer plans demonstrated high robustness, experiencing only minimal reductions in target coverage. Significance. While the +/- 10% spot size tolerance is appropriate in majority of the cases, lung cancer plans may require more stringent criteria. As DynamicARC becomes clinically available, measuring spot size errors in practice will be essential to validate these findings and refine tolerance thresholds for clinical use.