Investigation of absolute dose calibration accuracy for TomoTherapy using real water

Tingtian Pang, Bo Yang, Xia Liu, James R. Castle, Lang Yu, Nan Liu, Wenbo Li, Tingting Dong, Jie Qiu, Quan Chen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

A systematic bias in TomoTherapy output calibration was reported by the Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core Houston (IROC-H) after analyzing intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) credentialing results from hundreds of TomoTherapy units. Multiple theories were developed to explain this observation. One theory was that the use of a solid water “cheese” phantom instead of real water in the calibration measurement was the culprit. A phantom filled with distilled water was built to investigate whether our TomoTherapy was miscalibrated due to the use of a solid water phantom. A miscalibration of −1.47% was detected on our TomoTherapy unit. It is found that despite following the vendor's updated recommendation on computed tomography (CT) number to density calibration, the cheese phantom was still mapped to a density of 1.028 g/cm3, rather than the 1.01 g/cm3 value reported in literature. When the density of the cheese phantom was modified to 1.01 g/cm3 in the treatment planning system, the measurement also indicated that our TomoTherapy machine was miscalibrated by −1.52%, agreeing with the real water phantom findings. Our single-institution finding showed that the cheese phantom density assignment can introduce greater than 1% errors in the TomoTherapy absolute dose calibration. It is recommended that the absolute dose calibration for TomoTherapy be performed either in real water or in the cheese phantom with the density in TPS overridden as 1.01 g/cm3.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)139-145
Number of pages7
JournalJournal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics
Volume22
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

Keywords

  • Tomotherapy
  • output calibration

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Radiation
  • Instrumentation
  • Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging

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