Overview

Synopsis

IDEAL is a set python modules and scripts that can be used to compute the dose distribution (in the patient or in a phantom) for a given treatment plan. The dose calculations are based on Geant4/Gate (specifically Gate-RTion).

Disclaimers

  • IDEAL is NOT a medically certified product.

  • This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License [GPLv3] for more details.

  • IDEAL has been developed and tested for clinical use at EBG MedAustron GmbH, using the specific combination of beamlines, treatment planning software and computing infrastructure in that clinic. We wrote this software with the hope that it will be useful in other clinics as well, but we cannot guarantee that it will work correctly right out of the box.

Intended Use

Clinical use

“IDEAL is a software system designed for dose calculation of treatment plans produced by a Treatment Planning System (TPS) for scanned ion beam delivery. IDEAL provides an independent estimate of the dose distribution expected for the proposed treatment plan. The evaluation and review of the dose distributions is done by the qualified trained radiation therapy personnel. The intended use is as a quality assurance tool only and not as a treatment planning device.”

Research use

IDEAL is intended as a research tool to study dose distributions in PBS ion beam therapy. Research topics could include the properties of passive elements, biological effect models, patient motion and much more.

Intended Users

IDEAL was written to be used by medical physicists and/or IT professionals in scanned ion beam therapy clinics. The user roles are:

clinical user

Medical physicist in charge of patient specific quality assurance (PSQA). This user uses IDEAL to obtain an independent dose calculation, as described in Intended Use.

commissioning user

Medical physicist in charge of validating and commissioning IDEAL. This user will provide all site specific data, such as beam models, geometrical details of nozzles and passive elements, Hounsfield lookup tables for all CT protocols, etc.

admin user

Medical physicist or IT professional who installs and maintains the IDEAL software on a clinical site. The admin user makes sure that the software is correctly installed, assists the commissioning user with configuring the IDEAL with the correct and up to date commissioning data and manages the queue of calculation jobs on the cluster.

research user

Medical physicist who uses IDEAL for “research” purposes, i.e. any purpose that is not the independent dose calculation of a clinical treatment plan.

The software currently allows to assign these roles to users, however in the 1.0 release these roles are not enforced. This is a TODO item.

User interfaces

IDEAL can be used through several user interfaces:

  1. Command line interface: the clidc.py script (“command line independent dose calculation”) can be used to trigger a dose calculation based on a given DICOM treatment plan file that was exported (together with the corresponding CT, structure set and TPS dose calculations) from the TPS to directory on a shared file system (IDEAL typically does not run on the same hardware as the TPS). The output (dose distributions for each beam in the plan) is saved in DICOM as well. This interface is useful for commissioning and research.

  2. Via a custom PyQt GUI: only to be used for research.

  3. Research scripting: IDEAL has been written in a modular way, such that its functionality is available to research users via python modules.