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Using Automation to Improve Compliance with TG-263 Nomenclature Standards

E Covington*, R Popple , R Cardan , Univ Alabama Birmingham, Birmingham, AL

Presentations

(Thursday, 7/18/2019) 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: 304

Purpose: To increase the compliance of use of TG-263 nomenclature, different treatment planning system (TPS) tools were utilized. Compliance was evaluated over two time periods: (1) After introduction of a policy to use the standard combined with the release of TPS templates (2) After implementation of an automated structure name check within the TPS.

Methods: Upon adoption of the TG-263 standard, structure name templates were created for the TPS to facilitate implementation. Approximately 12 months later, we released an automated structure name check via an application programming interface (API) script within the TPS. The check flags any non-compliant structure names using regular expressions to evaluate compliance. Dosimetrists are required to run the checks and correct non-compliant names before plan approval. Compliance data was collected by querying the TPS database by retrieving all structures names from treatment approved plans during the aforementioned time periods. This study only tracks compliance of organs at risk structure names.

Results: During the two periods, there were 30,646 structure names and 29,631 structures names evaluated, respectively. The error rate for the first period was 8.2% and was reduced to 2.6% after implementation of the automated check. During the first 3 months post script release, the error rate was 5.6% and was reduced to 0.9% in the most recent 3 months.

Conclusion: The introduction of a departmental policy did not eliminate non-complaint names even with the release of structure name templates. The introduction of automated check greatly reduced the error rate, although non-compliant names still occur in approved plans. A future release of the script will suggest approved names and automatically correct them within the TPS.

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