PURPOSE: In vivo dosimetry is now widely recommended to avoid major treatment error. Transit dosimetry using portal imagers allows fast and accurate in vivo dose verifications. Several teams have published clinical studies but no recommendation has been proposed to define tolerance levels and validation criteria. This study proposes a simple methodology to assess the overall standard deviation of transit dosimetry and was applied to our transit dosimetry method.MATERIAL AND METHODS: In a first step, the uncertainties due to the dose reconstruction method are evaluated. Their estimation is based on a set of geometries, representative of clinical situations for which 45 points of measurement have been defined. In a second step, we studied the variations of our method in clinical situations. During the treatment session of the patient, the dose was reconstructed and the differences between reconstructed dose and prescribed dose were used to define a realistic tolerance level, adapted to the clinical routine. Then, a methodology is proposed to determine if the transit dosimetry method, with the defined tolerance level allows detecting significant treatment errors (>5% of the prescribed dose). RESULTS - CONCLUSION: Applying this methodology we concluded that a tolerance level of 6.5% (k=2) can be associated with our method. With this value, it is demonstrated that in many cases differences of 5% (or less) on the prescribed dose can be detected. This study demonstrates clearly that in vivo transit dosimetry is not able to detect all the treatment errors but remains an ultimate and efficient tool in many situations.
Algorithms Humans