Quantitative Assessment of the Quality of External Radiotherapy Planning for Patients with Prostate Cancer

Abstract

Purpose. To quantify the quality of treatment planning for patients with prostate cancer for three different radiotherapy technologies. Materials and methods. The quality of irradiation planning was assessed using the index of homogeneity, conformality and comparison of critical organs doses for 40 patients with prostate cancer using various irradiation technologies: 3D conformal radiation therapy 3DCRT, radiation therapy with intensity modulation IMRT, radiation therapy with intensity modulation in rotation mode RapidArc. The technologies are implemented on conventional electron accelerators of the Clinac iX (Varian, USA), Clinac 2300 CD (Varian, USA) and UniquePower (Varian, USA) models with a nominal photon radiation energy 6 and 18 MeV. Results. The dependences of the homogeneity indices HI, conformality CI within the target, and critical organs doses on the irradiation technology for patients with prostate cancer were obtained. Taking into account the predictive capabilities of the HI index for relapse-free survival, the optimal technology for irradiating patients was chosen. It has been shown that Rapid Arc technology dominates for prostate cancer.