Proton Therapy QA Around the Globe: IROC Houston's Multi-Institutional Audit Program

The Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core (IROC) Houston QA Center is part of a cooperative that oversees the quality assurance of clinical trials funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for radiation therapy and radiologic imaging. IROC Houston's mission is to ensure the NCI that participating institutions deliver clinically comparable and consistent dose so radiotherapy data from multi-institutional trials can be collected and compared. With the increasing use of proton radiation therapy, many multi-institutional clinical trials have begun to incorporate proton therapy as a delivery modality. The NCI tasked IROC Houston with developing a method of auditing participating proton therapy centers. To this end, IROC has established both a remote and on-site audit program for proton therapy that is the most comprehensive proton peer review program in the world.