Commissioning of SharePlan: the liverpool experience

SharePlan is a treatment planning system developed by Raysearch Laboratories AB to enable creation of a linear accelerator intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) plan as a backup for a Tomotherapy plan. A 6MV Elekta Synergy Linear accelerator photon beam was modelled in SharePlan. The beam model was validated using Matrix Evolution, a 2D ion chamber array, for two head-neck and three prostate plans using 3%/3mm Gamma criteria. For 39 IMRT beams, the minimum and maximum Gamma pass rates are 95.4% and 98.7%. SharePlan is able to generate backup IMRT plans which are deliverable on a traditional linear accelerator and accurate in terms of clinical criteria. During use of SharePlan, however, an out-of-memory error frequently occurred and SharePlan was forced to be closed. This error occurred occasionally at any of these steps: loading the Tomotherapy plan into SharePlan, generating the IMRT plan, selecting the optimal plan, approving the plan and setting up a QA plan. The out-of-memory error was caused by memory leakage in one or more of the C/C++ functions implemented in SharePlan fluence engine, dose engine or optimizer, as acknowledged by the manufacturer. Because of the interruption caused by out-of-memory errors, SharePlan has not been implemented in our clinic although accuracy has been verified. A new software program is now being provided to our centre to replace SharePlan.