Commissioning and testing of a commercial intensity modulated treatment planning system

We report on the commissioning and testing of a commercial intensity-modulated radiation treatment planning system, Corvus 3.0. It is based on a simulated annealing inverse planning algorithm that generates intensity-modulated fluence maps and monitor units for each treatment field. Treatments were delivered with a dynamic multi-leaf collimator using the "step-and-shoot" method. Fidelity of delivery of the modulated beams was verified with film dosimetry. Dose to isocenter and isodose distributions in various axial planes were measured with ion chamber, film and TLDs. A simple algorithm was developed to independently calculate the dose at isocenter using the fluence maps and monitor units generated by Corvus. All tests demonstrated agreement with the Corvus calculations to /spl plusmn/3%. Detailed results are presented and discussed.