The Main Event

« Free stuff | Main | Marvellous magnet »

Quality assured

As the AAPM exhibition opened its doors, my first stop was TomoTherapy’s booth, where the Madison, WI-based equipment maker was pushing its newest offering - the Tomo Quality Assurance (TQA) tool. TQA is a quality-assurance system that the company has developed specifically for use with its Hi.Art radiotherapy system.

In simple terms, TQA works by automatically gathering data from Hi.Art’s integrated sensors and monitoring subsystems, and then making these data easily accessible to the medical physicist. According to TomoTherapy’s press release, the application not only streamlines data collection but also simplifies the data review process.

"In eight minutes, you get enhanced daily QA - much more than is possible using external equipment," Bob Cravens, lead applied physicist and TQA architect, told the gathered crowd. He noted that clinicians already using a TQA prototype tend to rely on TQA more and more, while using their own calibration equipment far less.

The initial TQA release – available as of today – comes with up to seven modules, including basic dosimetry and system monitor modules. A static step wedge module uses a stepped phantom to measure things such as output, energy, couch speed, profiles, field width and laser offsets. There’s also a helical step wedge module that provides information on gantry position, a longitudinal beam profile package, and two modules that examine linac alignment. More options are in the pipeline.

"Hi-Art was the enabler for the oncologists and TQA will be the enabler for the medical physicists," said Cravens.

Posted by Tami Freeman on July 27, 2008 11:40 PM | Permalink