Quality assurance methodology for Varian RapidArc treatment plans

With the commercial introduction of the Varian RapidArc, a new modality for treatment planning and delivery, the need has arisen for consistent and efficient techniques for performing patient-specific quality assurance (QA) tests. In this paper we present our methodology for a RapidArc treatment plan QA procedure. For our measurements we used a 2D diode array (MapCHECK) embedded at 5 cm water equivalent depth in MapPHAN 5 phantom and an Exradin A16 ion chamber placed in six different positions in a cylindrical homogeneous phantom (QUASAR). We also checked the MUs for the RapidArc plans by using independent software (RadCalc). The agreement between Eclipse calculations and MapCHECK/MapPHAN 5 measurements was evaluated using both absolute distance-to-agreement (DTA) and gamma index with 10% dose threshold (TH), 3% dose difference (DD), and 3 mm DTA. The average agreement was 94.4% for the DTA approach and 96.3% for the gamma index approach. In high-dose areas, the discrepancy between calculations and ion chamber measurements using the QUASAR phantom was within 4.5% for prostate cases. For the RadCalc calculations, we used the average SSD along the arc; however, for some patients the agreement for the MUs obtained with RadCalc versus Eclipse was inadequate (discrepancy > 5%). In these cases, the plan was divided into partial arc plans so that RadCalc could perform a better estimation of the MUs. The discrepancy was further reduced to within similar to 4% using this approach. Regardless of the variation in prescribed dose and location of the treated areas, we obtained very good results for all patients studied in this paper.