Quality assurance program of a respiratory gating irradiation system based on external and internal fiducial markers

Abstract

Respiratory Gating involves the administration of radiation during treatment delivery within a particular portion of the patient’s  breathing cycle, so the absorbed dose administration with respiratory control techniques requires specific quality control to ensure the correctness of the delivered dose.

The establishment of a Quality Control Program (QC) is proposed for the Respiratory Gating based techniques in order to have a better understanding of how this system works and to know its associated dosimetric impact.

The influence of the CT acquisition under respiratory motion conditions has been analyzed for the treatment isocenter localization, using internal and external fiducial markers with IGRT techniques that allow the correlation of the isocenter positioning with the phase of the respiratory cycle.

Radiation delivery in the presence of intrafraction organ motion causes an averaging or blurring of the static dose distribution over the path of motion increasing the beam penumbra of the radiation field and reducing the therapeutic region when the irradiation is not breath controlled.

The feasibility of intensity modulated treatments (IMRT) for both static and dynamic techniques, managed by respiratory control has been tested, demonstrating the possibility of synchronizing the movement of the leaves in the micromultileaf collimator (mMLC) with the gated beam irradiation.