Publications by authors named "W Ferris"
Background: This paper outlines the protocol for the ecofit implementation-effectiveness trial, a multi-component mobile Health (mHealth) intervention that aims to increase resistance and aerobic physical activity in primary care-based adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D). This study will be conducted as part of the Diabetes Alliance Program Plus (DAP+), a large-scale integrated health service intervention in a large health district in Australia. The ecofit program has previously demonstrated efficacy and effectiveness in insufficiently active people with (or at risk of) T2D and community dwelling-adults, respectively.
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- This study introduces a method for treating pancreatic cancer with stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) using a magnetic resonance-guided linear accelerator (MR-linac) that adapts daily and monitors motion in real-time while applying abdominal compression.
- The process involves a combination of MRI and CT simulations, including advanced imaging techniques to ensure accurate treatment planning and verification during radiation sessions.
- Results from 26 patients indicate that abdominal compression effectively reduces motion during treatment and yields clinical outcomes comparable to existing literature, allowing for more continuous treatment delivery compared to other techniques.
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- The Elekta Unity MR linac's limitations in couch motion and laser positioning make it challenging to perform patient-specific quality assurance (PSQA) for lateral targets in intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT).
- This study presents a method using the Sun Nuclear ArcCheck-MR phantom, allowing PSQA at lateral positions without requiring extra equipment or construction.
- The proposed method showed high gamma pass rates over 94% for patient plans, enhancing measurement flexibility for offset targets, especially when the planning target volume (PTV) edge is further from the isocenter than the diagonal array's radius.
Background: Quality assurance measurement of IMRT/VMAT treatment plans is resource intensive, and other more efficient methods to achieve the same confidence are desirable.
Purpose: We aimed to analyze treatment plans in the context of the treatment planning systems that created them, in order to predict which ones will fail a standard quality assurance measurement. To do so, we sought to create a tool external to the treatment planning system that could analyze a set of MLC positions and provide information that could be used to calculate various evaluation metrics.
To evaluate the impact of CT number calibration and imaging parameter selection on dose calculation accuracy relative to the CT planning process in thoracic treatments for on-board helical CT imaging systems used in helical tomotherapy.Direct CT number calibrations were performed with appropriate protocols for each imaging system using an electron density phantom. Large volume and SBRT treatment plans were simulated and optimized for planning CT scans of an anthropomorphic thorax phantom and transferred to registered kVCT and MVCT scans of the phantom as appropriate.
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