Feasibility on Statistical Process Control Analysis of Delivery Quality Assurance in Helical Tomotherapy

The purpose of this study was to retrospectively investigate the upper and lower control limits of treatment planning parameters using EBT film based delivery quality assurance (DQA) results and to analyze the results of statistical process control (SPC) in helical tomotherapy (HT). A total of 152 patients who passed or failed DQA results were retrospectively included in this study. Prostate (n = 66), rectal (n = 51), and large-field cancer patients, including lymph nodes (n = 35), were randomly selected. The absolute point dose difference (DD) and global gamma passing rate (GPR) were analyzed for all patients. Control charts were used to evaluate the upper and lower control limits (UCL and LCL) for all the assessed treatment planning parameters. Treatment planning parameters such as gantry period, leaf open time (LOT), pitch, field width, actual and planning modulation factor, treatment time, couch speed, and couch travel were analyzed to provide the optimal range using the DQA results. The classification and regression tree (CART) was used to predict the relative importance of variables in the DQA results from various treatment planning parameters. We confirmed that the proportion of patients with an LOT below 100 ms in the failure group was relatively higher than that in the passing group. SPC can detect QA failure prior to over dosimetric QA tolerance levels. The acceptable tolerance range of each planning parameter may assist in the prediction of DQA failures using the SPC tool in the future.