AAPM medical physics practice guideline 13.a: HDR brachytherapy, part B

The goal of this report is to assist the clinical medical physicist in assuring that key quality standards and practice considerations are met to ensure safe, reliable, and reproducible high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy (BT) treatment. This guideline has been developed to provide appropriate minimum standards for such services. The secondary goal is to provide recommendations to the regulatory community from the experts to guide the adoption of regulations in the future. This MPPG is limited to iridium-192-based HDR brachytherapy and will not discuss electronic, low-dose rate, pulsed dose rate brachytherapy, or any alternative radionuclide. Scope: This MPPG 13a report is divided into two parts. Part A has been previously published¹ and describes the infrastructure and program design in the creation of an afterloader-based HDR brachytherapy program. This publication, Part B, describes the clinical treatment processes including site-specific imaging, planning, and treatment delivery. MPPG 13a Part B starts with the arrival of the patient to the clinic and concludes with emergency procedures and error mitigation. Disclaimer: It is the responsibility of all healthcare staff to be familiar with state and federal guidelines that may take precedence over AAPM recommendations that are provided in this report. Each health care facility may have site-specific or state-mandated needs and requirements that may modify their usage of these recommendations.