Abstract
Craniospinal irradiation (CSI) is a complex radiation therapy technique that is used for patients, often children and teenagers/young adults, with tumors that have a propensity to spread throughout the central nervous system such as medulloblastoma. CSI is associated with important long-term side effects, the risk of which may be affected by numerous factors including radiation modality and technique. Lack of standardization for a technique that is used even in larger radiation oncology departments only a few times each year may be one such factor and the current ad hoc manner of planning new CSI patients may be greatly improved by implementing a dose-volume histogram registry (DVHR) to use previous patient data to facilitate prospective constraint guidance for organs at risk. In this work, we implemented a DVHR and used it to provide standardized constraints for CSI planning. Mann-Whitney U tests and mean differences at 95% confidence intervals were used to compare two cohorts (pre- and post-DVHR intervention) at specific dosimetric points to determine if observed improvements in standardization were statistically significant. Through this approach, we have shown that the implementation of dosimetric constraints based on DVHR-derived data helped improve the standardization of pediatric CSI planning at our center. The DVHR also provided guidance for a change in CSI technique, helping to achieve practice standardization across TomoTherapy and IMRT.