• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.181-189
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• 2017

The conventional delivery quality assurance (DQA) process for RapidArc (Varian Medical Systems, Palo Alto, USA), has the limitation that it measures and analyzes the dose in a phantom material and cannot analyze the dosimetric changes under the motional organ condition. In this study, a DQA method was designed to overcome the limitations of the conventional DQA process for internal target volume (ITV) based RapidArc. The dynamic DQA measurement device was designed with a moving phantom that can simulate variable target motions. The dose distribution in the real volume of the target and organ-at-risk (OAR)s were reconstructed using 3DVH with the ArcCHECK (SunNuclear, Melbourne, USA) measurement data under the dynamic condition. A total of 10 ITV-based RapidArc plans for liver-cancer patients were analyzed with the designed dynamic DQA process. The average pass rate of gamma evaluation was $81.55{\pm}9.48%$ when the DQA dose was measured in the respiratory moving condition of the patient. Appropriate method was applied to correct the effect of moving phantom structures in the dose calculation, and DVH data of the real volume of target and OARs were created with the recalculated dose by the 3DVH program. We confirmed the valid dose coverage of a real target volume in the ITV-based RapidArc. The variable difference of the DVH of the OARs showed that dose variation can occur differently according to the location, shape, size and motion range of the target. The DQA process devised in this study can effectively evaluate the DVH of the real volume of the target and OARs in a respiratory moving condition in addition to the simple verification of the accuracy of the treatment machine. This can be helpful to predict the prognosis of treatment by the accurate dose analysis in the real target and OARs.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.116-121
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• 2021

Purpose: To investigate the effects of dose rate on intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA). Methods: We performed gamma tests using portal dose image prediction and log files of a multileaf collimator. Thirty treatment plans were randomly selected for the IMRT QA plan, and three verification plans for each treatment plan were generated with different dose rates (200, 400, and 600 monitor units [MU]/min). These verification plans were delivered to an electronic portal imager attached to a Varian medical linear accelerator, which recorded and compared with the planned dose. Root-mean-square (RMS) error values of the log files were also compared. Results: With an increase in dose rate, the 2%/2-mm gamma passing rate decreased from 90.9% to 85.5%, indicating that a higher dose rate was associated with lower radiation delivery accuracy. Accordingly, the average RMS error value increased from 0.0170 to 0.0381 cm as dose rate increased. In contrast, the radiation delivery time reduced from 3.83 to 1.49 minutes as the dose rate increased from 200 to 600 MU/min. Conclusions: Our results indicated that radiation delivery accuracy was lower at higher dose rates; however, the accuracy was still clinically acceptable at dose rates of up to 600 MU/min.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.491-502
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• 2022

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.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.39-45
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of a software-based quality assurance system based on Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy treatment plan. Evaluate treatment plan through the D VH analysis, PTV mean dose ($D_{mean}$) and PTV 95% dose($D_{95}$) compare the MFX based on original treatment plan, Average error rate was $0.9{\pm}0.6%$, $1.0{\pm}0.8%$, respectively. Measuring point dose using phantom and ion chamber, the average error rate between the ionization chamber and MFX was $0.9{\pm}0.7%$, $1.1{\pm}0.7%$ (high dose region), $1.1{\pm}0.9%$, $1.2{\pm}0.7%$ (low dose region). The average gamma though of MFX and $Delta^{4PT}$ is $98.7{\pm}1.2%$, $98.4{\pm}.3%$, respectively. Through this study, A software based QA system that simplifies hardware based QA procedures that involve a lot of time and effort. It can be used as a simple and useful tool in clinical practice.

• The Journal of Korean Society for Radiation Therapy
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.30-44
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• 1998

Accurate delivery of doses using a high dose rate(HDR) brachytherapy, remote afterloading system(RALS) depends on knowing the strength of the radioactive source at the time of treatment, the precision and consistency of the timer, and the ability of the unit to position the source at the proper dwell location along the applicator. Periodic Quality Assurance(QA) on HDR machines is a part of the standard protocol of any user. The safety of the patient & staff, positional accuracy, temporal accuracy, and dose delivery accuracy are periodically(weekly, quarterly, monthly) estimated using HDR source(Ir-192), treatment planning devices, measurement devices, and overall treatment devices with regard to treatment delivery. The overall measurement results are estimated successfully and assessed its clinical significance. As a result, our HDR brachytherapy units has been very accurate until now. The QA program protocol permits routine clinical use and provides a high confidence level in the accurate operation of HDR units. Therefore, regular QA of HDR brachytherapy is essential for successful treatment.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.32-42
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• 2019

Background: There have been much efforts to develop the proper and realistic machine Quality Assurance (QA) reflecting on real Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) plan. In this work we propose and test a special VMAT plan of plan-class specific (pcsr) QA, as a machine QA so that it might be a good solution to supplement weak point of present machine QA to make it more realistic for VMAT treatment. Materials and Methods: We divided human body into 5 treatment sites: brain, head and neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis. One plan for each treatment site was selected from real VMAT cases and contours were mapped into the computational human phantom where the same plan as real VMAT plan was created and called plan-class specific reference (pcsr) QA plan. We delivered this pcsr QA plan on a daily basis over the full research period and tracked how much MLC movement and dosimetric error occurred in regular delivery. Several real patients under treatments were also tracked to test the usefulness of pcsr QA through comparisons between them. We used dynalog file viewer (DFV) and Dynalog file to analyze position and speed of individual MLC leaf. The gamma pass rate from portal dosimetry for different gamma criteria was analyzed to evaluate analyze dosimetric accuracy. Results and Discussion: The maxRMS of MLC position error for all plans were all within the tolerance limit of < 0.35 cm and the positional variation of maxPEs for both pcsr and real plans were observed very stable over the research session. Daily variations of maxRMS of MLC speed error and gamma pass rate for real VMAT plans were observed very comparable to those in their pcsr plans in good acceptable fluctuation. Conclusion: We believe that the newly proposed pcsr QA would be useful and helpful to predict the mid-term quality of real VMAT treatment delivery.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.123-126
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• 2012

For the purpose of quality assurance (QA) of the blood irradiator, QA programs for daily, monthly, and yearly were developed. For daily tests, simple items for basically operating the machine are recommended. For monthly and yearly tests, the measurement of dose to assure the dose delivery system are performed by a dosimetry devices (Glass dosimeter jig) developed in this study. The QA program is practical for clinical environment.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2018

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) has been considered the most successful development in radiation oncology since the introduction of computed tomography into treatment planning that enabled three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy in 1980s. More than three decades have passed since the concept of inverse planning was first introduced in 1982, and IMRT has become the most important and common modality in radiation therapy. This review will present developments in inverse IMRT treatment planning and IMRT delivery using multileaf collimators, along with the associated key concepts. Other relevant issues and future perspectives are also presented.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.447-467
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• 1999

Most published work on product quality focuses on manufactured goods. The subject of service quality has received less attention. This distinction is important because some of the quality-improving strategies avaliable to manufacturers may be inappropriate for service firms. Services are performances, not objects. They are often produced in the presence of the customer, as in the cause of hotel restaurant services, quality occurs during service delivery, usually in an interaction between the customer and contact personnel of service firm. for this reason, service quality is highly dependent on the performance of employees, an organizational resource that cannot be controlled to the degree that components of tangible goods can be engineered. The study has begun as a basic study for customer satisfaction-oriented management in understanding the service quality of food & beverage products and through a systematic analysis of it. The major purpose of the study was to examine the relationship of the customer satisfaction and service quality in consideration of reliability, empathy, responsiveness, tangibility and assurance. An empirical research was conducted based on the previous theoretical studies. 286 customer at first class hotels in Seoul were selected as samples of this study. The time period of research was from February through March 1999, and answers were processed by SAS to yield frequency analysis, multivariate statistical analysis and regression analysis. The finding of the statistical treatment are frequencies, factor analysis, multiple regression analysis, path analysis. SERVQUAL method was used the service quality evaluation methods. After factor analysis, it was resulted to 3 factors. those were factor 1(assurance.empathy.responsiveness), factor 2(reliability), factor 3(tangibility). The findings of the statistical treatment are as follows. First, the attribute measurement of performance service quality was affected by customer satisfaction. Second, the attribute measurement of performance service qualify was affected by repurchase intention. Third, The attribute measurement of performance customer satisfaction was affected by repurchase intention. The result of study model was followed, service quality was affected repurchase intention than customer satisfaction. indirected effect through, service duality and customer satisfaction was affected repurchase intention.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.189-195
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• 2016

This paper aims to verify the clinical feasibility of a custom-made film created by a laser cutting tool for End-to-End (E2E) quality assurance in robotic intensity modulated radiation therapy system. The custom-made film was fabricated from the Gafchromic EBT3 film with the size of $8^{{\prime}{\prime}}{\times}10^{{\prime}{\prime}}$ using a drawing that is identical to the shape and scale of the original E2E film. The drawing was created by using a computer aided design program with the image file, which is obtained by scanning original E2E film. Beam delivery and evaluations were respectively performed with the original film and the custom-made film using fixed-cone collimator on three tracking modes: 6D skull (6DS), Xsight spine (XS), and Xsight lung (XL). The differences between total targeting errors of the original and custom-made films were recorded as 0.17 mm, 0.3 mm, and 0.17 mm at 6DS, XS, and XL tracking modes, respectively. This indicates that the custom-made film could yield nearly equivalent results to those of the original E2E film, given the uncertainties caused by distortions during film scanning and vibrations associated with film cutting. By confirming the clinical feasibility of a custom-made film for E2E testing, it can be expected that economic efficiency of the testing will increase accordingly.