A comparison of the dosimetric effects of intrafraction motion on step-and-shoot, compensator, and helical tomotherapy-based IMRT

Abstract

Intrafraction motion during intensity-modulated radiation therapy can cause differences between the planned and delivered patient dose. The magnitude of these differences is dependent on a number of variables, including the treatment modality. This study was designed to compare the relative susceptibility of plans generated with three different treatment modalities to intrafraction motion. The dosimetric effects of motion were calculated using computational algorithms for seven lung tumor patients. Three delivery techniques - MLC-based step-and-shoot (SNS), beam attenuating compensators, and helical tomotherapy (HT) - were investigated. In total 840 motion-encoded dose-volume histograms (DVHs) were calculated for various combinations of CTV margins and sinusoidal CTV motion including CTV offsets. DVH-based metrics (e.g., D95% and D0.5%) were used to score plan degradations. For all three modalities, dosimetric degradations were typically smaller than 3% if the CTV displacement was smaller than the CTV margin. For larger displacements, technique and direction-specific sensitivities existed. While the HT plans show similar D95% degradations for motion in the SI and AP directions, SNS and compensator plans showed larger D95% degradations for motion in the SI direction than for motion in the AP direction. When averaged over all motion/margin combinations, compensator plans resulted in 0.9% and 0.6% smaller D95% reductions compared to SNS and HT plans, respectively. These differences were statistically significant. No statistically significant differences in D95% degradations were found between SNS and HT for data averaged over all margin and motion track combinations. For CTV motion that is larger than the CTV margin, the dosimetric impact on the CTV varies with treatment technique and the motion direction. For the cases presented here, the effect of motion on CTV dosimetry was statistically smaller for compensator deliveries than SNS and HT, likely due to the absence of the interplay effect which is present for the more dynamic treatment deliveries. The differences between modalities were, however, small and might not be clinically significant. As expected, margins that envelop the CTV motion provide dosimetric protection against motion for all three modalities.