It has my pleasure to work with my colleagues Wolfgang Tomé and Heming Zhen on a multi-phased study on the methods and metrics of patient-specific Dose QA.
Recently, we published our third paper on this topic called “On the use of biomathematical models in patient-specific IMRT dose QA,” which was published in Medical Physics 40(7). This paper looked at how to use biological model-based DVH reduction methods to analyze dose changes observed during per-patient dose QA, but more importantly raised the idea of using bio-models to assess the “robustness” of highly conformal plans (IMRT and VMAT). That is, wouldn’t it be useful to quantify how susceptible these plans are (or would be) to TPS or delivery errors? Moreover, wouldn’t this make sense to do as part of optimizing the plan vs. after? It’s a common sense approach to quality.