Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine and quantify set-up errors in patient positioning at head-and-neck radiotherapy and to investigate the impact of the choice of patient origin (patient neck or patient skull) on the magnitude of set-up errors.
Method: Set-up position corrections obtained using On-Board Imaging OBI 2D/2D matching were recorded automatically for every treatment fraction. 3413 such treatment records for 117 patients with head-and-neck cancer treated with volumetric modulated arc therapy VMAT in the years 2013 and 2014 on a single treatment machine in our clinic were analysed. In 75 of them, patient origin was set on the patient skull, and in 42 of them, they were set on the patient neck.
Results: Standard deviation of group systematic error in the vertical, longitudinal and lateral direction, as well as in the couch rotation were found to be 2.5 mm, 2.1 mm, 1.9 mm and 0.43䃦 for the patient origin on patient skull and 2.6 mm, 1.8 mm, 1.7 mm and 0.48䃦 were found to be for the patient origin on patient neck. Random error of the vertical, longitudinal, lateral and rotational position correction was 1.8 mm, 1.5 mm, 1.6 mm and 0.62䃦 (skull) and 2.0 mm, 1.6 mm, 1.5 mm and 0.61䃦 (neck). For both origin set-ups, the distribution of rotational corections was showing a pronounced deviation from a normal distribution, indicating that radiation therapists were reluctant to apply very small rotational corrections. Wilcoxon rank-sum test was showing a significant (p<0.05) difference between two patient origin set-ups only in correction distributions in the longitudinal direction. Positional shifts in different directions were found to be mostly uncorelated; however, in the case of rotational correction, this effect was dominated by the fact that in 75 % of the cases, no rotation correction was applied. When only considering the records where rotational correction was applied, a weak corelation (τB, 0.37 for skull and 0.33 for neck) between the rotational correction and lateral shift was found.
Conclusions: Based on the results, neither patient origin set-up showed a clear advantage over the other in terms.
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