ESTRO 2025 - Abstract Book

S10

Invited Speaker

ESTRO 2025

Background

The radiotherapy community faces global challenges to expand and improve the quality of training for its workforce. The lack of availability of clinical equipment for training sessions and of experienced clinical Physicists are limitations experienced both in countries with well-developed training programmes and those seeking to establish professional societies and training schemes to modernise their radiotherapy services. Computer simulation training tools provide practical solutions, offering interactive experiential learning and standardisation to learning. A key benefit is the ability to safely explore errors and their impact. In the radiotherapy physics context, the impact of poor measurement practice or not following protocols appropriately can be explored virtually without risk of actual machine miscalibration. The Virtual Environment for Radiotherapy Training (VERT) system has been established in Radiographer/RTT training centres in approximately 40 countries and has become a standard in their training. The system includes simulation of physics metrology equipment, including scanning water phantoms and solid water blocks, ionisation chambers and small field detectors. These are used to practice and understand measurement processes related to Linac QC. These simulations have been further developed to provide a sophisticated virtual experimental platform wherein random and systematic errors may be included and measurement uncertainties are tracked. To broaden the accessibility of VERT beyond the classroom, a cloud-based Learning Management system (LMS) has been implemented that serves the VERT software to individual users at their chosen place of study, enabling guided, self-paced, asynchronous learning and to undertake exercises to assess knowledge and competency acquisition.

TRS398/ TRS483 simulations

The IAEA TRS398 and TRS483 protocols for the dosimetry of standard MV x-ray clinical treatment beams and very small treatment beams are implemented in VERT. These include sophisticated simulations of the required measurements. Workflow GUIs guide the trainee through the details of the protocols to create the correction factors needed to calibrate appropriate ionisation chambers to measure the dose produced by the 6MV and 15MV beam simulations available on the virtual Linacs. For small fields, FFF measurements are also simulated.