Abstract
Purpose: Develop an automated plan‐quality evaluation program for multi‐institutional clinical trials to improve case review efficiency. This program is generally applicable to routine clinical process to raise practice quality level. Methods: In this study, we developed an automated plan‐quality evaluation program which combines MIMVista, Java/MATLAB, and extensible markup language (XML). More specifically, MIMVista is used for data visualization; Java and its powerful function library are implemented for calculating dosimetry parameters; and to improve the clarity of the index definitions, XML is applied. The accuracy and the efficiency of the program were evaluated by comparing the results of the program with the manually recorded results in two RTOG trials. Results: A slight difference of about 0.2% in volume or 0.6Gy in dose between the automated program and manual recording was observed. According to the criteria of indices, there was no significant difference between the two methods. The evaluation time was reduced from 10–20 minutes to 2 minutes by applying the automated plan‐quality evaluation program. Conclusion: Quality review efficiency was much improved by using this automated plan‐quality evaluation tool. Accuracy was also improved as human error was eliminated. This tool will be made freely available to benefit general clinical practice.
