Key recommendations guide safe and effective practice for Australia, New Zealand
THURSDAY, May 26, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The Faculty of Radiation Oncology in Australia and New Zealand has issued recommendations for the use of image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). The position paper was published online April 27 in the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Oncology.
Albert Tiong, M.B.B.S., from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues describe issues that radiotherapy departments throughout Australia and New Zealand should consider; outline the role of IGRT and reviews current clinical evidence supporting the benefit of IGRT in genitourinary, head and neck, and lung cancers; and highlight important international publications which provide guidance on implementation and quality assurances for IGRT.
The authors offer recommendations to provide guidance to the community for the safe and effective application of IGRT technologies. These include: establishing a multi-professional team responsible for IGRT activities; monitoring a program of daily, monthly, and annual quality assurance for all new or existing IGRT subsystems; identifying who is responsible for approval of IGRT correction decision; establishing and documenting site-specific planning procedures, specifically the procedure for defining planning target volume margins; linking these planning procedures to IGRT procedures; adopting a standardized lexicon for IGRT activities across the program regardless of technology; and formulating checklist(s) for the IGRT process.
“To ensure safe and good quality IGRT practice, each radiotherapy department should review recommendations available in the literature, and examine at an institutional level factors such as the accuracy of target delineation, planning target volume margins, imaging quality, and action points for movement, etc.” the authors write.
Copyright © 2016 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
