Is there a clinical benefit with a smooth compensator design compared with a plunged compensator design for passive scattered protons?

In proton therapy, passive scattered proton plans use compensators to conform the dose to the distal surface of the planning volume. These devices are custom made from acrylic or wax for each treatment field using either a plunge-drilled or smooth-milled compensator design. The purpose of this study was to investigate if there is a clinical benefit of generating passive scattered proton radiation treatment plans with the smooth compensator design.

Variation in external beam treatment plan quality: An inter-institutional study of planners and planning systems.

Purpose: This study quantifies variation in radiation treatment plan quality for plans generated by a population of treatment planners given very specific plan objectives.

Methods And Materials: A "Plan Quality Metric" (PQM) with 14 submetrics, each with a unique value function, was defined for a prostate treatment plan, serving as specific goals of a hypothetical "virtual physician." The exact PQM logic was distributed to a population of treatment planners (to remove ambiguity of plan goals or plan assessment methodology) as was a predefined computed tomographic image set and anatomic structure set (to remove anatomy delineation as a variable).