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Quantification Of Imrt Severity Scores For Improvement Of Fmea Results, Jacqueline T. Faught

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Accurate delivery of intensity modulation radiation therapy (IMRT) requires perfect execution of a long, complicated chain of events; failure of any component of this process may contribute to dose delivery errors, compromising treatment quality and, more importantly, patient safety. Prospective, process-wide risk mitigation techniques are becoming more prevalent in radiotherapy to establish comprehensive quality management (QM) programs, such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). The subjective nature of the ordinal scores used for FMEA leads questionable reliability and validity of the results. Additionally, physics components are commonly grouped together, leaving out valuable details important to physics QM. While the …