Technical Report: Efficient constancy evaluation of the Eclipse treatment planning system's photon and electron dose calculation algorithms aided by the third-party ClearCheck software

Abstract

Our institutional approach to performing periodic constancy checks on dose calculations for the Varian Eclipse treatment planning system is described, including details of how the Radformation ClearCheck software is leveraged for highly efficient results analysis. Photon- and electron-specific synthetic phantoms are created which allow all modality-specific fields to be spatially separated and calculated in a single plan, with field-specific structures encompassing individual irradiated volumes facilitating field-specific dose distribution evaluations. Plan comparison templates in ClearCheck allow for the near-instantaneous evaluation of 116 and 165 individual calculation metrics for photon and electron fields, respectively. The methodology is further applied to the Radformation ClearCalc finite-size pencil beam and electron algorithms for secondary algorithm validation. The total time required for constancy evaluations of 6 primary algorithms and 4 secondary algorithms is less than one hour, with much of that time used for passive dose calculation.