Inclusion of the dose from kilovoltage cone beam CT in the radiation therapy treatment plans

Purpose: Cone beam CT is increasingly being used for daily patient positioning verification during radiation therapy treatments. The daily use of CBCT could lead to accumulated patient doses higher than the older technique of weekly portal imaging. There have been several studies focusing on measurement or calculation of the patient dose from CBCT recently. Methods: This study investigates the feasibility of configuring a kV x-ray source in a commercial treatment planning system to calculate the dose to patient resulting from an IGRT procedure. The method proposed in this article can be used to calculate dose from CBCT imaging procedure and include that in the patient treatment plans. Results: The kilovoltage beam generated by the CBCT imager has been modeled using the planning system. The modeled profiles agree with the measured ones to within 5%. The modeled beam was used to calculate dose to phantom in the pelvic region and the calculations were compared to TLD measurements. The agreement between calculated and measured doses ranges from 0% to 19% in soft tissue with larger variations observed near and within the bone. Conclusions: The modeling of the beam produces reasonable results and the dose calculation comparisons indicate the potential for computing kilovoltage CBCT doses using a treatment planning system. Further improvements in the dose calculation algorithm are necessary, especially for dose calculations in and near the bone.