Module
Plan and chart review that runs the same way every time
A physics plan check is a long list of items, performed by a tired human, under time pressure, at the end of the day. The items that matter most are the ones most easily skipped. This module runs every one of them on every case, and puts the exceptions in front of a physicist.
The problem is consistency, not knowledge
Physicists know what to check. A risk-informed review of the highest-consequence failure modes produces well over a hundred initial-review items for external-beam photon and electron treatment alone, spanning patient assessment, simulation and treatment planning. No clinic performs all of them with equal attention on every case, and the errors that reach a patient are disproportionately the ones caught late or not at all. Deterministic software does not get tired, does not skip an item because the case looks routine, and does not vary between Monday and Friday.
What the module does
- Runs your checks
- Deterministic checks derived from your own approved protocols and procedures, versioned and owned. No constraint or threshold is hard-coded into the product.
- Covers the standard families
- Patient, course and plan identity; prescription and fractionation consistency; image, orientation, registration and structure-set consistency; required structures, naming, laterality and approval state; machine, energy, technique, couch, bolus and accessories; isocentre, fields, control points, jaw and MLC behaviour, and monitor units; algorithm, grid, heterogeneity and normalisation; coverage and organ reporting; hotspots, spill, conformity and gradient; prior radiation and cumulative dose; independent calculation status; required documents and signatures.
- Recomputes independently
- Critical metrics are recomputed by a separate implementation. Where the two differ, the difference is shown rather than reconciled.
- Detects the unusual
- Statistical comparison against your own approved reference cohorts, so a plan that passes every rule but sits at the 94th percentile for modulation is still raised.
- Prioritises
- Blocking, review and note, each with the rule, the affected object, the owner and the required action. Passed checks collapse into one line.
- Produces the record
- A drafted review summary with every finding, its resolution, who decided and why.
What it does not do
Boundaries of this module
- Approve a plan. Approval is a human gate with a named role and, for physics review, two independent signers.
- Calculate a clinically authoritative dose. Metrics come from imported dose or deterministic fixtures.
- Write to the planning system. No write path is implemented.
- Replace the physics review. It changes what a physicist spends the review on.
What it is built on
- Check structure
- Organised as initial, on-treatment and end-of-treatment review, following the structure used in published physics plan and chart review guidance.
- Nomenclature
- Structure names resolved against your schema and standard radiation-oncology nomenclature so that every rule can parse them.
- Reporting notation
- Dose-volume reporting in standard notation, so what the software reports is what a physicist already reads.
See it working
The routine synthetic case has 147 checks, 146 of which passed silently. The one that did not is a monitor-unit anomaly against the reference cohort — not a rule failure, and not something a checklist would catch.
Status