Dosimetric comparison of helical tomothearpy and linac-based IMRT in whole abdomen radiotherapy

Recent advances in radiotherapy techniques have allowed a significant improvement in the therapeutic ratio of whole abdominal irradiation (WAI) through linear-accelerator (Linac) based intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and helical tomotherapy (HT). IMRT has been shown to reduce the dose to organs at risk (OAR) while adequately treating the tumor volume. HT operates by adjusting 51 beam directions, couch speed, pitch and shapes of a binary multileaf collimator (MLC), with the purpose of clinically increasing the befit to the patient. We incorporated helical tomotherapy as a new modality for WAI for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients whose disease involved the intestine and the mesenteric lymph nodes. Excellent tumor coverage with effective sparing of normal organ sparings, and homogeneous dose distribution could be achieved. This study dosimetrically compared HT and linac-based IMRT by using several indices, including the conformity index (CI) and the homogeneity index (HI) for the planning target volume (PTV), as well as the, max dose and the mean dose and the quality index (QI) for five organs at risk (OARs). The HI and the CI were used to compare the quality of target coverage while the QI was used compare the dosimetric performans for OAR systems. The target coverages between the two systems were similar, but the most QIs were lower than 1, what means that HT is batter at sparing OARs than IMRT. Tomotherapy enabled excellent target coverage, effective sparing of normal tissues, and homogeneous dose distribution without severe acute toxicity.