Radiological Physics Center: RADS database

The Radiological Physics Center (RPC) was established in 1969 by the National Cancer Institute to provide quality assurance for institutions participating in NCI cooperative clinical trials involving radiation therapy. Since that time, the RPC has collected data from on-site dosimetry review visits, remote TLD monitoring, retrospective chart reviews and more recently, pre-approval processes. Data from these programs were warehoused in 16 independent databases and maintained by software which had exceeded its usefulness. As a result, we have converted the RPC databases into a single relational database developed in ORACLE 8.0™ running on Novell™. We have also redesigned the RPC internal software using Visual Basic™ and reports using Crystal Reports™. The relational database model improves the accessibility of the RPC data, the efficiency of the RPC operations and dissemination of RPC data to the radiation oncology community. As a result of the conversion to the new system, demographics of data warehoused in our system were generated as tools for the acceptance process. In particular, manufacturers and models of radiation therapy machines in use, ion chamber measurements made by the RPC grouped by model and beam quality, and participation of institutions in study groups. Examples of results show that on an average institutions have two radiation therapy machines with at least one being a dual energy linear accelerator, less than 5% of machines in use are cobalt machines, RPC has made at least five measurements on 45 different models of radiation therapy units, and on the average an institution participates in three study groups.