TARGET: A GPU-Based patient-specific quality assurance system for radiation therapy

MODERN INTENSITY-MODULATED RADIATION THERAPY (IMRT) and volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) technologies deliver more conformal dose to targets while sparing normal healthy tissues than conventional radiotherapy. To achieve these goals, the treatment planning and delivery process for IMRT and VMAT have become much more complicated and less intuitive to users. For instance, inverse treatment planning is utilized where values of thousands of variables, if not more, are adjusted by a computer program via specialized optimization algorithms to achieve the desired dosimetric goal. During delivery, many components in a linear accelerator (linac) are precisely controlled to deliver the optimized plan to the patient. This process is more error prone than conventional radiotherapy and consequences caused by the errors are probably more severe. Therefore, a quality assurance (QA) procedure is needed before the first treatment fraction to check for potential errors in the patient-specific plan, both in the treatment planning stage and in the plan delivery stage.