Quality assurance of an image guided intracranial stereotactic positioning system for radiosurgery treatment with helical tomotherapy

The aim of this work was to determine the accuracy and precision of stereotactic localization and treatment delivery using a helical tomotherapy based stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) system. A tomotherapy specific radiosurgery workflow was designed that exploits the system's on board megavotage CT (MVCT) imaging system so that it not only provides a pre-treatment volumetric verification image that can be used for stereotactic localization, eliminating the need for a patient-frame based coordinate system, but also supplies the treatment planning image. Using an imaging guidance based intracranial stereotactic positioning system, a head ring and tabletop docking device are used only for fixation, while image guidance is used for localization. Due to the unconventional workflow, a methodology for determining the localization accuracy was developed and results were compared to other linear accelerator based radiosurgery systems. In this work, the localization error using volumetric localization was found to be 0.45 mm +/- 0.17 mm, indicating a localization precision of 0.3 mm within a 95% confidence interval. In addition, procedures for testing the delivery accuracy of the Tomotherapy system are described. Results show that the accuracy of the delivery can be verified to within +/- 1 voxel dimension. These results are well within conventional SRS tolerances and compare favorably to other linear accelerator based techniques.