Standardizing nomenclatures in radiation oncology

Charles S. Mayo (Chair),¹ Jean M. Moran (Vice Chair),¹ Walter Bosch,² Ying Xiao,³ Todd McNutt,⁴ Richard Popple,⁵ Jeff Michalski,² Mary Feng,⁶ Lawrence B. Marks,⁷ Clifton D. Fuller,⁸ Ellen Yorke,⁹ Jatinder Palta,¹⁰ Peter E. Gabriel,³ Andrea Molineu,⁸ Martha M. Matuszak,¹ Elizabeth Covington,¹¹ Kathryn Masi,¹² Susan L. Richardson,¹³ Timothy Ritter,¹⁴ Tomasz Morgas,¹⁵ Stella Flampouri,¹⁶ Lakshmi Santanam,² Joseph A. Moore,⁴ Thomas G. Purdie,¹⁷ Robert Miller,¹⁸ Coen Hurkmans,¹⁹ Judy Adams,²⁰ Qing-Rong Jackie Wu,²¹ Colleen J. Fox,²² Ramon Alfredo Siochi,²³ Norman L. Brown,²⁴ Wilko Verbakel,²⁵ Yves Archambault,¹⁵ Steven J. Chmura,²⁶ Don G. Eagle,²⁷ Thomas J. Fitzgerald,²⁸ Andre L. Dekker,²⁹ Theodore Hong,²⁰ Rishabh Kapoor,¹⁰ Beth Lansing,³⁰ Shruti Jolly,¹ Mary E. Napolitano,³¹ James Percy,³⁰ Mark S. Rose,³² Salim Siddiqui,³³ Christof Schadt,³⁴ William E. Simon,³² William L. Straube,² Sara T. St. James,³⁵ Kenneth Ulin,²⁸ Sue S. Yom,⁶ Toruun Yock²⁰

¹University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; ²Washington University, St. Louis, MO; ³University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA; ⁴Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; ⁵University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL; ⁶University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; ⁷University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC; ⁸MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX; ⁹Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY; ¹⁰Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA; ¹¹Birmingham, Alabama; ¹²Karmanos Cancer Center, Detroit, MI; ¹³Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, WA; ¹⁴Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center, Richmond, VA; ¹⁵Varian Medical Systems, Palo Alto, CA; ¹⁶University of Florida, Jacksonville, FL; ¹⁷The Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Toronto, ON, Canada; ¹⁸Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL; ¹⁹Catharina Hospital, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; ²⁰Massachusetts General Hopsital, Boston, MA; ²¹Duke University, Durham, NC; ²²Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, NH; ²³West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV; ²⁴Baptist Medical Center, Jacksonville, FL; ²⁵VY University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands; ²⁶University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; ²⁷Northwest Medical Physics Center, Lynnwood, WA; ²⁸University of Massachusetts, Worcester, MA; ²⁹Maastricht University Medical Center, Maastricht, Netherlands; ³⁰Elekta Corporation, St. Louis, MO; ³¹Consultant, Suwanee, Georgia; ³²Sun Nuclear, Melbourne, FL; ³³Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, MI; ³⁴Brain Lab, Chicago, IL; ³⁵University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Report of AAPM Task Group No. 263 (2018).

The radiation oncology community can benefit from standardized nomenclatures applied to targets, normal tissue structures, and treatment planning concepts and metrics. Such conformity enhances safety and quality efforts within and between clinics for routine ongoing practice, and it enables data pooling for outcomes research, registries, and clinical trials. Standardization is a vital precursor to the development of scalable uses of scripting for quality assurance and treatment plan evaluation. Increased clarity and consistency through standardizing nomenclatures in these areas would provide broad benefits. The charge of AAPM Task Group 263 is to provide nomenclature guidelines in radiation oncology for use in clinical trials, data-pooling initiatives, population-based studies, and routine clinical care by standardizing: 1. structure names across image processing and treatment planning system platforms; 2. nomenclature for dosimetric data (e.g., dose/volume histogram [DVH]-based metrics); 3. templates for clinical trial groups and users of an initial subset of software platforms to facilitate adoption of the standards; and 4. formalism for nomenclature schema which can accommodate the addition of other structures defined in the future.