What is AQUA?
Quality control testing is very important in radiation oncology to ensure that imaging and treatment machines are performing safely within specifications. Each piece of equipment may have its own requirements in terms of the measurements that need to be taken and the frequency of testing. The increase in treatment complexity, coupled with an increased awareness of the importance of radiation safety has further raised the bar for quality assurance. AQUA is a comprehensive software platform that centralizes all of the quality assurance activities for radiation therapy, helping to manage the complexity of these testing requirements in a modern radiation therapy department.
How does AQUA help?
AQUA integrates the individual techniques for testing imaging and treatment equipment to provide a single interface for managing, analyzing, documenting and storing quality control data. It helps improve safety and performance while increasing efficiency for the radiotherapy clinic. Users can manually enter pass/fail or numerical results from quality control tests, and AQUA can compare those values to the benchmarks and tolerances, while for others AQUA can automatically analyze and process the results.
How is AQUA different?
Though there are many quality control hardware and software tools in the market, they are test-specific. By centralizing the management of quality control and assurance testing, AQUA streamlines the workflow for a busy radiation therapy department, integrating quality control into the clinical environment. A workflow manager can identify the tasks that each user must accomplish each day, and the email alert system ensures that none are missed. A dashboard view provides the manager with a real-time assessment of the quality control status of the entire department at a glance. AQUA can also integrate into the control system of some pieces of equipment, such as Elekta LINACs, to automate some quality control tests. The software includes the algorithms to automatically analyze some test data, such as those involving the capture of a set of 2D images, further reducing the burden of testing.
AQUA is flexible enough, through plug-ins and scripting tools, to meet the needs of any radiation therapy clinic, no matter how large or small or what their installed base of equipment is.