Illustrated instructions for mechanical quality assurance of a medical linear accelerator.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop and test a set of illustrated instructions for effective training for mechanical quality assurance (QA) of medical linear accelerators (linac).

Methods: Illustrated instructions were created for mechanical QA and underwent several steps of review, testing, and refinement. Eleven testers with no recent QA experience were then recruited from our radiotherapy department (one student, two computational scientists, and eight dosimetrists).