Abstract
Background and purpose
Quality assurance (QA) for radiation treatment has become a priority since poorly
delivered radiotherapy can negatively influence patient outcome. Within a national
project we evaluated the feasibility of a central review platform and its role in
improving uniformity of clinical target volume (CTV) delineation in daily practice.
Material and methods
All Belgian radiotherapy departments were invited to participate and were asked to
upload CTVs for rectal cancer treatment onto a secured server. These were centrally
reviewed and feedback was given per e-mail. For each five consecutive patients per
centre, the overlap parameter dice coefficient (DC) and the volumetric parameters
volumetric ratio (RV) and commonly contoured volume (VCC) were calculated.
Results
Twenty departments submitted 1224 eligible cases of which 909 were modified (74.3%).
There was a significant increase in RV and VCC between the first ten patients per
centre and the others. This was not seen for DC. Statistical analysis did not show
a further significant improvement in delineation over the entire review period.
Conclusion
Central review was feasible and increased the uniformity in CTV delineation in the
first ten rectal cancer patients per centre. The observations in this study can be
used to optimize future QA initiatives.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: April 21, 2014
Accepted:
March 4,
2014
Received in revised form:
February 12,
2014
Received:
November 15,
2013
Identification
Copyright
© 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
