TU-C-9A-01: IROC Organization and Clinical Trial Credentialing

As a response to recommendations from a report from the Institute of Medicine, NCI is reorganizing it clinical trial groups into a National Clinical Trial Network (NCTN) that consists of four adult groups (Alliance, ECOGACRIN, NRG, and SWOG) and one children's group (COG). NRG will house CIRO, a center to promote innovative radiation therapy research and intergroup collaboration in radiation. The quality assurance groups that support clinical trials have also been restructured. ITC, OSU Imaging corelab, Philadelphia Imaging core-lab, QARC, RPC, and RTOGQA have joined together to create the Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core (IROC) Group. IROC's mission is to provide integrated radiation oncology and diagnostic imaging quality control programs in support of the NCI's NCTN thereby assuring high quality data for clinical trials designed to improve the clinical outcomes for cancer patients worldwide. This will be accomplished through five core services: site qualification, trial design support, credentialing, data management, case review.These changes are important for physicist participating in NCI clinical trials to understand. We will describe in detail the IROC's activities and five core services so that as a user, the medical physicist can learn how to efficiently utilize this group. We will describe common pitfalls encountered in credentialing for current protocols and present methods to avoid them. These may include the which benchmarks are required for NSABP B-51/RTOG 1304 and how to plan them as well as tips for phantom planning. We will explain how to submit patient and phantom cases in the TRIAD system used by IROC. Learning Objectives: To understand the basic organization of IROC, its mission and five core services To learn how to use TRIAD for patient and phantom data submission To learn how to avoid common pitfalls in credentialing for current trials