Angular correction methodology and characterization of a high‐resolution CMOS array for patient specific quality assurance on a robotic arm linac

Abstract

PurposeTo develop an angular correction methodology and characterize a high‐resolution complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor (CMOS) array for patient specific quality assurance on a robotic arm linear accelerator.MethodsBeam path files from the treatment planning software (TPS) were used to calculate the angle of radiation beam with respect to the detector plane. Beams from multiple discrete angles were delivered to the CMOS detector array and an angular dependency look up table (LUT) was created. The LUT was then used to correct for the angular dependency of the detector. An iso‐centric 5 mm fixed cone, non iso‐centric multi‐target fixed cone, 10 mm Iris and a multi‐leaf collimator (MLC) based collimated plan were delivered to the phantom and compared to the TPS with and without angular correction applied. Additionally, the CMOS array was compared to gafchromic film and a diode array.ResultsLarge errors of up to 30% were observed for oblique angles. When angular correction was applied, the gamma passing rate increased from 99.2% to 100% (average gamma value decreased from 0.29 to 0.14) for the 5‐mm iso‐centric cone plan. Similarly, the passing rate increased from 84.0% to 100% for the Iris plan and from 49.98% to 98.4% for the MLC plan when angular correction was applied. For the multi‐target plan, applying angular correction improved the gamma passing rate from 94% to 99.6%. The 5 mm iso‐centric fixed cone plan was also delivered to film, and the gamma passing rate was 91.3% when using gafchromic film as the reference dataset, whereas the diode array provided insufficient sampling for this plan.ConclusionA methodology of calculating the beam angle based on the beam path files was developed and validated. The array was demonstrated to be superior to other quality assurance tools because of its sub‐millimeter spatial resolution and immediate read out of the results.