Hyperthermia quality assurance guidelines

Abstract

These Hyperthermia Quality Assurance guidelines are a result of a joint workshop of the Hyperthermia Committee of the American College of Radiology and the Hyperthermia Physics Center, which is the national quality assurance program under Contract No. N01-CM-37512 with the National Cancer Institute. Hyperthermia technology presently lacks the kind of standardization in equipment, treatment procedures, patient monitoring, and treatment documentation available in radiotherapy. Therefore, preventing unacceptable variability in treatment data demands a strong commitment to in-house quality control procedures and to centralized quality assurance reviews in cooperative multi-institutional trials. This paper presents a set of test procedures necessary to ensure proper operation of equipment, suggests a frequency for such tests, and also includes guidelines on quality control procedures to be used during treatment to improve the safety, effectiveness, and reproducibility of hyperthermia treatments. A set of forms are presented to indicate the minimum data, albeit incomplete, that must be collected for acceptable documentation of treatment. These guidelines should be valuable not only to the new entrants in the field but also to those participating in multi-institutional cooperative hyperthermia trials. They have been approved by the Hyperthermia Committees of American College of Radiology, American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, Radiation Therapy Oncology Group and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.