Spatially Fractionated Radiation Therapy Implementation At Intermountain Cancer Center

Spatially Fractionated Radiation Therapy (SFRT) is a treatment method that distributes a non-uniform dose with alternating peaks and valleys within a tumor. It is an effective technique to treat large and bulky tumors with limited toxicity to surrounding Organs At Risk (OAR), which is normally hard to treat using traditional radiation therapy methods. It can either be delivered by using a three-dimensional conformal planning technique (either physical block or virtually using Multi Leaf Collimators (MLC)), or by Lattice Radiation Therapy (LRT) using Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) technique. The scope of this work is to compare and implement SFRT treatment techniques at Intermountain Cancer Center (ICC). This requires the investigation of physical and dosimetric characteristics of the grid, describing its clinical implementation and verification, creating treatment plans on test patients using different methods of SFRT, assessment of the parameters that decides the acceptability of the plan, establishing Quality Assurance (QA) methods, and making recommendations about treatment planning and dose reporting. All the measurement results for SFRT commissioning were found to be within clinically acceptable agreement for implementation at ICC.