Author: Caiden Atienza, Daniel E. Hyer, Samuel D. Rusu, Blake R. Smith, Joel J. St-Aubin 👨🔬
Affiliation: Iowa Health Care, University of Iowa 🌍
Purpose: Pinnacle3 TPS (Philips Radiation Oncology Systems, Fitchburg, WI, USA) support is set to end by December 31, 2026. This work presents a validated method to archive Pinnacle data, which may be needed for patient re-treatment considerations.
Methods: Oncospace (Oncospace, Inc., Baltimore, MD, USA) can convert native or TAR formats of Pinnacle files to a standard DICOM format. The CT data, structures, and dose is converted to DICOM resampled to a 2 mm slice thickness. Tarballed patients were converted and archived for 8 versions of Pinnacle (7.4f, 8.0d, 8.0m, 9.0, 9.2, 9.8, 9.10, 16.2). Twenty-five random patient files were validated for each version of Pinnacle by reviewing plan name, the MU per beam, the dose distribution, structures, max dose point, the number of beams, and the number fractions. An archival error was recorded if any of these fields were inconsistent or if the dataset was incompletely archived. In addition to the validation, the amount of space and time required to archive Pinnacle plans in DICOM format was recorded.
Results: Per patient, the average TAR size was found to be 687.38MB. Using a 1GB network with 7 hops, the average transfer time from Pinnacle to an internal NAS was found to be 16±1s. Indexing took about 10s per patient. The average conversion time from TAR to DICOM in Oncospace was 45.9±0.9s per patient. The average converted size was 155±25.5MB. The average transfer time to ProKnow (Elekta Solutions AB, Stockholm, Sweden) was found to be 77±10s. An archival error rate of 0.5% was observed for the subset of validated patient plan.
Conclusion: Oncospace has been validated as a solution for the conversion of Pinnacle data to DICOM.