Clinical Development and Evaluation of Megavoltage Topogram for Fast Patient Alignment on Helical Tomotherapy

PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate a fast patient localization tool using megavoltage (MV)-topogram on helical tomotherapy. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Eighty-one MV-topogram pairs for 18 pelvis patients undergoing radiation were acquired weekly under an institutional review board–approved clinical trial. The MV-topogram imaging protocol requires 2 orthogonal acquisitions at static gantry angles of 0 degrees and 90 degrees for a programed scan length. A MATLAB based in-house software was developed to reconstruct the MV-topograms offline. Reference images (digitally reconstructed topograms, digitally reconstructed topograms) were generated using the planning computed tomography and tomotherapy geometry. The MV-topogram based alignment was determined by registering the MV-topograms to the digitally reconstructed topogram using bony landmark on commercial MIM software. The daily shifts in 3 translational directions determined from MV-topograms were compared with the megavoltage computed tomography (MVCT) based patient shifts. Linear-regression and two one-sided tests equivalence tests were performed to investigate the relation and equivalence between the 2 techniques. Seventy-eight MV-topogram pairs for 19 head and neck patients were included to validate the finding. RESULTS: The magnitudes of alignment differences of (MVCT − MV-topogram) (and standard deviations) were −0.3 ± 2.1, −0.8 ± 2.4, and 1.6 ± 1.7 mm for pelvis and 0.6 ± 1.2, 0.8 ± 4.2, 1.6 ± 2.6 mm for head and neck; the linear-regression coefficients between 2 imaging techniques were 1.18, 1.10, 0.94, and 0.86, 0.63, 0.38 in the lateral, longitudinal, vertical directions for pelvis and head and neck, respectively. The acquisition time for a pair of MV-topograms was up to 12.7 times less than MVCT scans (coarse scan mode) while covering longer longitudinal length. CONCLUSIONS: MV-topograms showed equivalent clinical performance to the standard MVCT with significantly less acquisition time for pelvis and H&N patients. The MV-topogram can be used as an alternative or complimentary tool for bony landmark-based patient alignment on tomotherapy.