Technical Quality Control
Technical Quality Control Guidelines
Making sure the technology works
Technical Quality Control (TQC) guidelines provide direction for assuring optimal performance of radiation treatment equipment and technologies in RT programs across the country; an essential requirement of high quality and safe patient care.
While technical drivers from international organizations like the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) exist, they may not be applicable across the spectrum of practice, are not always updated regularly, and may not have been properly validated.
In 2010 CPQR, together with the Quality Assurance and Radiation Safety Advisory Committee (QARSAC) of COMP, undertook an extensive review of the outdated CAPCA standards. The process resulted in a suite of 14 equipment and technology guidelines, and an overarching technical quality control guideline – together termed the TQC Suite.
The TQC Suite of guidelines provide direction for assuring minimum performance and safety of radiation treatment equipment and technologies in radiation treatment programs in Canada. The documents were developed by expert reviewers, and included community feedback through a formal public review process followed by “real-life” field testing and validation. A formal review to ensure continuity among the individual guidelines within the suite, and to ensure pan-Canadian relevance, was undertaken by Associate Editors. Documents were translated into French to encourage uptake and utilization at all centres within the country.
These documents are made available free of charge to the medical physics community and are available for download below.
In 2020, CPQR released a suite of self audit tools allowing radiation treatment programs to evaluate their compliance with existing TQC guidelines. For a full list of all self-audit tools available from CPQR, please visit our self-audit page.
Let CPQR know if you have questions or requests for clarification.
| Guideline | Expert Reviewers | Self Audit Tool |
| Technical quality control guidelines for Canadian radiation treatment centres | CPQR | No self audit tool available |
| Safety systems | John Schreiner | No self audit tool available |
| Accelerator integrated cone beam systems for verification imaging | Jean-Pierre Bissonnette | ACB.2015.04.02 |
| Brachytherapy remote afterloaders | Normand Freniere | BRA.2015.06.02 |
| Conventional radiotherapy simulators | Marie-Joelle Bertrand | CRS.2015.06.02 |
| Computed tomography simulators | Philippe Despres | CTS.2016.07.02 |
| CyberKnife | Eric VanderVoort, Horacio Patrocinio, Tom Chow, Emilie Soisson, Dominic Nadeau | No self audit tool available |
| Data management systems | Natalie Pomerleau-Dalcourt, Parminder Basran | No self audit tool available |
| GammaKnife | Anita Berndt, Mathieu Guillot, Monique vanProoijen | No self audit tool available |
| Kilovoltage radiotherapy machine | Christophe Furstoss | No self audit tool available |
| Low dose rate permanent seed brachytherapy | Luc Beaulieu | LDR.2013.04.01 |
| Magnetic Resonance Imaging | Beibei Zhang, Teo Stanescu, Keith Wachowicz, Jenna King, Jean-Charles Côté | MRI.2020.05.01 |
| Major dosimetry equipment | Gerard Lagmago Kamta | MDE.2015.02.02 |
| Medical linear accelerators and multi-leaf collimators | Charles Kirkby, Esmaeel Ghasroddashti, Crystal Plume Angers, Erin Barnett, Grace Zeng | MLA.2016.07.03 |
| Patient-specific dosimetric measurements for modulated therapies | Andrea McNiven | No self audit tool available |
| Treatment planning systems | Eduardo Villarreal-Barajas | TPS.2015.06.02 |
What’s Next
Looking towards the future, CPQR will continue to support the maintenance and development of the TQC Suite of guidelines, working with QARSAC on activities that assure the continued utility and relevance of these documents