Surface Guided Radiotherapy (SGRT) is a relatively new technique for positioning patients and for monitoring patient movement during treatment. SGRT is completely non‐invasive since it uses visible light for determining the position of the patient surface. A reduction in daily imaging for patient setup is possible if the accuracy of SGRT is comparable to imaging. It allows for monitoring of intrafraction motion and the radiation beam can be held beyond a certain threshold resulting in a more accurate irradiation. The purpose of this study was to investigate setup uncertainty and the intrafraction motion in non‐gated whole breast cancer radiotherapy treatment using an integrated implementation of AlignRT (OSMS) system as SGRT. In initial setup, SGRT was compared to three‐point setup using tattoos on the patient and orthogonal kV imaging. For the investigation of intrafraction motion, OSMS monitored the patient with six degrees of freedom during treatment. Using three‐point setup resulted in a setup root‐mean‐square error from the isocenter of 5.4 mm. This was improved to 4.2 mm using OSMS. For the translational directions, OSMS showed improvements in the lateral direction (P = 0.0009, Wilcoxon rank‐sum), but for the longitudinal direction and rotation it was not possible to show improvements (P = 0.96 and P = 0.46, respectively). The vertical direction proved more accurate for three‐point setup than OSMS (P = 0.000004). Intrafraction motion was very limited with a translational median of 1.1 mm from the isocenter. While OSMS showed marked improvements over laser and tattoo setup, the system did not prove accurate enough to replace the daily orthogonal kV images aligned to bony anatomy.
Introduction. Patients with left-sided breast cancer with lymph node involvement have routinely been treated with enhanced inspiration gating (EIG) for a decade at our institution. In a transition from EIG to deep inspiration breath hold (DIBH) we compared the two techniques with focus on target coverage, dose to organs at risk and reproducibility of the inspiration level (IL). Material and methods. Twenty-four patients were computed tomography (CT) scanned with EIG and DIBH. For DIBH we used visual feedback and for EIG audio coaching, both during scan and treatment. Treatment plans for 50 Gy over 25 fractions were calculated. Seventeen of the patients were included in the analysis of reproducibility. They were audio coached for one minute before beam-on in DIBH at nine treatment sessions. These respiration curves were analysed with average maximum IL and standard deviation (SD) for the EIG part of the respiratory signal, and mean IL and SD for the DIBH. Comparison of dosimetric and respiration parameters were performed with the Wilcoxon signed rank-sum test. Results. In DIBH, the ipsilateral lung volume increased further compared to EIG (p Ͻ 0.0004, mean increase 11%). This lead to a 9% mean reduction (p ϭ 0.002) of the ipsilateral lung volume receiving 20 Gy (V 20 Gy). We found no other signifi cant dosimetric differences between the two methods. The reproducibility of the IL was better with the DIBH method, observed as a signifi cantly smaller SD in most patients (p Ͻ 0.04 for 16 of 17 patients). Conclusion. The DIBH method resulted in a signifi cantly larger lung volume and lower ipsilateral lung V 20 Gy compared to EIG. The IL for visually guided DIBH was more reproducible than audio-coached EIG. Based on these fi ndings, the DIBH technique is our new breathing adaptation standard for radiotherapy of patients with left-sided breast cancer with lymph node involvement.
Objectives: Patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) were included in a prospective trial for radiotherapy in deep inspiration breath hold (DIBH). We evaluated DIBH compliance and target position reproducibility. Methods: Voluntary, visually guided DIBHs were performed with optical tracking. Patients underwent three consecutive DIBH CT scans for radiotherapy planning. We evaluated the intrafractional uncertainties in the position of the peripheral tumour, lymph nodes and differential motion between them, enabling PTV margins calculation. Patients who underwent all DIBH imaging and had tumour position reproducibility <8 mm were up-front DIBH compliant. Patients who performed DIBHs throughout the treatment course were overall DIBH compliant. Clinical parameters and DIBH-related uncertainties were validated against our earlier pilot study. Results: 69 of 88 included patients received definitive radiotherapy. 60/69 patients (87%) were up-front DIBH compliant. DIBH plan was not superior in seven patients and three lost DIBH ability during the treatment, leaving 50/69 patients (72%) overall DIBH compliant. The systematic and random errors between consecutive DIBHs were small but differed from the pilot study findings. This led to slightly different PTV margins between the two studies. Conclusions: DIBH compliance and reproducibility was high. Still, this validation study highlighted the necessity of designing PTV margins in larger, representative patient cohorts. Advances in knowledge: We demonstrated high DIBH compliance in locally advanced NSCLC patients. DIBH does not eliminate but mitigates the target position uncertainty, which needs to be accounted for in treatment margins. Margin design should be based on data from larger representative patient groups.
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