My name is Mannah Kaniini, an MSc. student at the University of Zambia, in Zambia. Im doing a research as a requirement for me to graduate. the field of the project i inted to do is in the medical physics field. I have been reading a lot of your publications which i have found quite useful so far. I do have a question on the dosimetric indices such as DHI,COIN,CI,CN,OI, etc. what could be acceptable value for each? from most studies i have seen so far they just generally state the fact that for the CI,COIN and other a value close to 1 is ideal while for DNR and OI 0 is ideal. Is there a threshold or range to accept these values especially for a cervical implant
The parameters you mentioned are used for the evaluation of radiation therapy treatments, particularly for cervical cancer patients under treatment with brachytherapy (the use of enclosed radioactive material implanted in the body). These parameters (DHI, COIN, CI, CN, OI) are acronyms describing ways we take complex radiation dose and summarize it with numbers we can use to determine if a certain treatment meets the prescription of a radiation oncologist:
DHI: dose homogeneity index
COIN: conformity index
CI: coverage index
CN: conformation number
OI: overdose index
While these metrics may be helpful, they don't tell the whole story and can't be relied on fully to determine the quality of a treatment. Nevertheless, there are published studies that give us some idea of typical numbers we can expect. The following resource is just one example of these published data.
Palled, S. R., Radhakrishna, N. K., Manikantan, S., Khanum, H., Venugopal, B. K., & Vishwanath, L. (2020). Dosimetric comparison of manual forward planning with uniform dwell times versus volume-based inverse planning in interstitial brachytherapy of cervical malignancies. Rep Pract Oncol Radiother. 2020 Nov-Dec; 25(6): 851–855. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rpor.2020.08.005
Answered by