What are the advantages of Direct Aperture Optimization?
Advantages of DAO • More efficient treatment plans. With other systems, you often need half an hour or more to deliver the treatment. With this technique, you can treat your patients in conventional 15 minute time slots. This means that you won’t have to extend your treatment day to do IMRT. • The plans are more intuitive. With DAO, you don’t have to take such a dramatic change of going from 1 shape per direction to 20 or 30. We give you complete control over the complexity of the plan. If you want to start slowly, you could use say 2 apertures per beam direction. As you gain confidence, you can move to 4 or 5 which is more than enough for even the toughest cases. • Easier QA. Many of the complaints of physicists with regards to IMRT are related to QA. With DAO, QA is a snap. For one thing, the delivery of the plan should take 10 minutes or less. Secondly, our dose accuracy is very high. This is partly because we do not have small off-axis fields with small numbers of monitor units. Th
