Picket Fence module

This module analyzes Varian’s picket fence images. Pylinac’s module has been modified to allow for other types of MLCs, for example Agility.

Warning

Before you start using this module make sure that it is working as you would expect. You should create a dynamic beam that simulates a picket fence with intentional errors, and see if they are detected correctly.

Options

Clip box

Sometimes images have unwanted artifacts at the edges. Here you can enter the size of the central portion of the image beyond which pixel values will be set to background signal. If you don’t want to clip the image, put 0.

Filter

Apply a median filter to the image. If 0, then no additional filtering is performed. See Pylinac and scipy.ndimage.median_filter for further information.

Num of pickets

If too many pickets are detected, you can try to force the number of pickets beforehand. If 0, no number is defined. See Pylinac for further information.

Sag adjust

If 0, no adjustment is made. Otherwise Pylinac will shift the MLCs laterally according to the value that you entered.

MLC type

Select the appropriate MLC type. Note that this only changes how the pickets are sampled. Similarly to the Fieldsize module the lateral geometry of the leaves may not be totally correct because the dimensions are physical not dosimetric.

Orientation

If you have problems with the orientation of the pickets, you can force the orientation here.

Invert image?

Check this box if you wish to invert the image.

Load machine log

Not available in this version.

Results

Image

Each picket is delimited with two green lines. The spacing between the lines corresponds to the tolerance level.

Within the lines dashes correspond to the center (fwhm) of the region formed by the MLC pairs. If the leaf pair has passed the tolerance, the dash will be colored blue. If the leaf pair has passed the tolerance, but not the action tolerance, the dash will be colored purple. If the leaf pair is not within tolerance, the dash will be colored red.

The error histogram shows the error and std of each leaf pair averaged over all the pickets. If you hover over the bars, additional information will be shown. The yellow line is the action tolerance, the red line is the tolerance.

The red cross on the image represents the image center. If the dicom image contains the XRayImageReceptorTranslation tag, it will be taken into account. This is useful on modern Varian linacs.

_images/picketfence1.png
Results
  • Nr of picket

    How many pickets were detected.

  • Pass prcnt

    Passing percentage.

  • Max error

    Maximum overall deviation.

  • Max error picket

    Which picket line has the max error.

  • Max error leaf

    Which leaf pair has the max error. Leaf pair are enumerated from left to right (or up-down), starting with 0.

  • Median error

    The median of all errors.

  • Mean picket spacing

    The average spacing between picket lines.

  • Mean FWHM

    The average fwhm of all picket lines. Fwhm is evaluated from the mean MLC profile for each peak.

  • Offset from CAX

    The distance of each picket line from the CAX (red cross).

  • FWHM

    The fwhm of each picket line evaluated from the mean MLC profile.

  • Passed

    If the max error is within tolerance, the picket will pass the test.

Histogram shows the distribution of errors for all leaf pairs. If there are 7 pickets, each having 50 leaf pairs, then the histogram will have 350 counts altogether.

The MLC mean profile plot demonstrates the peaks for each picket line. Yellow dots signal the start and stop pixels between which peaks and fwhm are calculated. Horizontal dashes represent the fwhm. Because of the rounding effect, dashes may not be exactly horizontal.

_images/picketfence2.png

Note

The calculation of FWHM is done independently of Pylinac.