2022 AAMD Plan Study Results

Prologue

The results of the 2022 AAMD Plan Study were recently presented at the AAMD’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland by this year’s clinical organizers, Andrew Lin, CMD of Northwell Health and David Alicia, CMD of the Maryland Proton Treatment Center.

In this article you will find out how you can continue to learn from this study’s results, see a summary of some of the high performing individuals, and learn how to get involved in next year’s study.

Interactive Plan Library and Still-Active Scoring

Even though the submissions phase is over for this plan study, you can still use the technology to learn and improve. There are two main ways to continue to benefit from the 2022 event:

Interactive Library of Plans

If you were one of the 210 participants in this year’s event (i.e., you submitted a plan to the study), then you can peruse all of the submitted plans using the dedicated AAMD ProKnow site: https://aamd.proknow.com

All participants have been set up with an account for this site, and they merely need to sign in for the first time after which they will be able to navigate to the “2022 AAMD Plan Study: Results (Read-Only)” workspace to select individual plans and drill down to see dose distributions, scorecards, DVH curves, plan and beam parameters, and more. All plans in this read-only, interactive library have been anonymized.

Note: This will require a separate user account and login as the credentials you use for proknowsystems.com, but it only takes a few seconds to get started.

Continue Scoring New Plans

The plan study is still “live” for scoring new plans on the ProKnow Quality Systems platform. This is true even if you did not participate in the submissions phase of this plan study.

Simply sign in, go to the Organization: AAMD planning study library, and you will be able to score new plans, see the populations results, and learn from the experience of comparing your methods to your peers. You will not be able to submit a plan, but you can score as many different iterations as you want.

Results

Tables of high performers are shown below. Table 1 shows plans that received a high score (> 136) and also exhibited very efficient use of treatment beams (≤ 4) and total monitor units (< 5000). Table 2 shows photon plans in the top 33 percentile of all plans. Even though this specific study was focused on photon plans, several proton plans were submitted that also finished in the top 33 percentile of all scores, and these are shown in Table 3.

High-Performance, High-Efficiency

HIGH-PERFORMANCE, HIGH-EFFICIENCY (MU < 5000, # BEAMS ≤ 4, SCORE > 136)

Table 1. These participants excelled at producing not just a high score (score > 136) but also a very efficiency plan in terms of the number of beams (≤ 4) and total monitor units (< 5000).

High Scores, All Photon Plans

PHOTON PLANS: VMAT, IMRT, Helical, Robotic

Table 2. These are the photon plans that achieved a score in the top 33 percentile of all submissions.

High Scores, Proton Submissions

PROTON PLANS

Table 3. Even though this specific study was focused on photon plans, several proton plans were submitted that also finished in the top 33 percentile of all scores.

Interested in Leading the 2023 AAMD Plan Study?

Each year, organizations like the AAMD run plan studies using the ProKnow Quality Systems platform. The plan studies are managed by clinical leaders who step forward help select the dataset, design plan and dose objectives, set the scoring rules, and prepare the conference presentation.

If you have ideas for the 2023 AAMD Plan Study and/or want to be part of the clinical planning team, please contact the AAMD to learn the next steps!