title: A semi-automated tool for treatment plan-quality evaluation and clinical trial quality assurance.
abstract: The goal of this work is to develop a plan-quality evaluation program for clinical routine and multi-institutional clinical trials so that the overall evaluation efficiency is improved. In multi-institutional clinical trials evaluating the plan quality is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. In this note, we present a semi-automated plan-quality evaluation program which combines MIMVista, Java/MATLAB, and extensible markup language (XML). More specifically, MIMVista is used for data visualization; Java and its powerful function library are implemented for calculating dosimetry parameters; and to improve the clarity of the index definitions, XML is applied. The accuracy and the efficiency of the program were evaluated by comparing the results of the program with the manually recorded results in two RTOG trials. A slight difference of about 0.2% in volume or 0.6 Gy in dose between the semi-automated program and manual recording was observed. According to the criteria of indices, there are minimal differences between the two methods. The evaluation time is reduced from 10-20 min to 2 min by applying the semi-automated plan-quality evaluation program.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Jiazhou
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Wenzhou
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Studenski
authors.forename: Yunfeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xiao
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence / Q000592:standards*; D002681:China; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D011879:Radiotherapy Dosage / Q000592:standards; D011880:Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-Assisted / Q000592:standards*; D020266:Radiotherapy, Conformal / Q000592:standards*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012984:Software / Q000592:standards*