Analysis of human errors in the operation of various treatment planning systems over a 10-year period

Abstract

The present study aimed to summarize and report data on errors related to treatment planning, which were collected by medical physicists. The following analyses were performed based on the 10-year error report data: (1) listing of high-risk errors that occurred and (2) the relationship between the number of treatments and error rates, (3) usefulness of the Automated Plan Checking System (APCS) with the Eclipse Scripting Application Programming Interface and (4) the relationship between human factors and error rates. Differences in error rates were observed before and after the use of APCS. APCS reduced the error rate by ~1% for high-risk errors and 3% for low-risk errors. The number of treatments was negatively correlated with error rates. Therefore, we examined the relationship between the workload of medical physicists and error occurrence and revealed that a very large workload may contribute to overlooking errors. Meanwhile, an increase in the number of medical physicists may lead to the detection of more errors. The number of errors was correlated with the number of physicians with less clinical experience; the error rates were higher when there were more physicians with less experience. This is likely due to the lack of training among clinically inexperienced physicians. An environment to provide adequate training is important, as inexperience in clinical practice can easily and directly lead to the occurrence of errors. In any environment, the need for additional plan checkers is an essential factor for eliminating errors.