Inverse IMRT Plans Can Be Delivered with Conventional Jaws
Ping Xia, Ph.D.
It has been assumed that inverse planned IMRT plans are complex, requiring sophisticated hardware, software, and planning expertise. With advancement of IMRT treatment planning and delivery, this premise has changed. IMRT planning is simpler than three dimensional conformal planning and IMRT plans can be delivered with either modern multi-leaf collimator or conventional jaws. In this presentation, we are going to demonstrated that using a commercial treatment planning system with direct aperture based optimization (DAO), it is feasible to deliver IMRT plans for nasopharyngeal cancer and for prostate cancer with conventional jaws while keeping the delivery time within 20 minutes. The qualities of these simplified IMRT plans are better than that of 3DCRT plans, measured by dose volume histograms, dose uniformity and dose conformity indexes. In conclusion, IMRT can be implemented for hospitals with limited hardware resources, and inverse IMRT planning is simpler that the conventional 3D planning while achieving better plan quality.