Author: Kevin Peter Risolo 👨🔬
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania 🌍
Purpose: To quantify the improved efficiency of checking patient treatment plan MU by utilizing RadFormation’s ClearCalc script-based program.
Methods: A total of 58 patients planned for treatment on a C-arm linear accelerator across different modalities were run in both the institution’s legacy vendor Monitor Unit (MU) check installed program and in RadFormation’s ESAPI script-based ClearCalc. For each patient, the start and finish time of the MU check was noted and the total time recorded; “start” was denoted as the start of the calculation export to the MU check program, and “finish” the time of the MU check results being uploaded to the patient’s chart, inclusive of any calculation issues requiring user intervention to correct. This analysis was run across patients treated planned for 3D and VMAT photon; some patients included multiple treatment sites in the same course on the same CT/simulation dataset.
Results: For all patients in this study, ClearCalc produced a net time savings over the legacy program, with an average time savings of 87.9 seconds per patient. On further analysis, the time savings could be binned into two groups: single-site patients who had an average time savings of 65.7 seconds per patient, and multi-site patients who had an average time savings of 279.8 seconds.
Conclusion: For all patients, the improved efficiency is generally attributed to the different methods of running the two programs. For the legacy installed program, there’s a required DICOM-export and import of plan fields and dose for each plan. For ClearCalc, there is no DICOM transfer, and the script is run only once per patient. This was notably important for multi-site patients, where the legacy program required an export for each plan to the software, while for ClearCalc the plans could be simply selected from a dropdown menu in the script and then quickly calculated.