An empirical model of electronic portal imager response implemented within a commercial treatment planning system for verification of intensity‐modulated radiation therapy fields

Quality assurance (QA) of an intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) plan is more complex than that of a conventional plan. To improve the efficiency of QA, electronic portal imaging devices (EPIDs) can be used. The major objective of the present work was to use a commercial treatment planning system to model EPID response for the purpose of pre-treatment IMRT dose verification. Images were acquired with an amorphous silicon flat panel portal imager (aS500: Varian Medical Systems, Palo Alto, CA) directly irradiated with a 6-MV photon beam from a Clinac 21EX linear accelerator (Varian Medical Systems). Portal images were acquired for a variety of rectangular fields, from which profiles and relative output factors were extracted. A dedicated machine model was created using the physics tools of the Pinnacle3 (Philips Medical Systems, Madison, WI) treatment planning system to model the data. Starting with the known photon spectrum and assuming an effective depth of 7 cm, machine model parameters were adjusted to best fit measured profile and output factors. The machine parameters of a second model, which assumed a 0.8 MeV monoenergetic photon spectrum and an effective depth in water of 3 cm, were also optimized. The second EPID machine model was used to calculate planar dose maps of simple geometric IMRT fields as well as a 9-field IMRT plan developed for clinical trials credentialing purposes. The choice of energy and depth for an EPID machine model influenced the best achievable fit of the optimized machine model to the measured data. When both energy and depth were reduced by a significant amount, a better overall fit was achieved. In either case, the secondary source size and strength could be adjusted to give reasonable agreement with measured data. The gamma evaluation method was used to compare planar dose maps calculated using the second EPID machine model with the EPID images of small IMRT fields. In each case, more than 95% of points fell within 3% of the maximum dose or 3 mm distance to agreement. These results are slightly poorer than those obtained using an ion chamber array, which confirms agreement to within 2% of the maximum dose or 2 mm distance to agreement for all points within these fields.