TCoMX (Tomotherapy Complexity Metrics EXtractor) is a newly developed Matlab® (The Mathworks Inc, Natick, MA, USA) library for the automatic extraction of a wide set of complexity metrics from the DICOM RT-plan files of helical tomotherapy (HT) treatments. It was developed at the Medical Physics Department of the Veneto Instute of Oncology (IOV-IRCCS). The current version of TCoMX (v1.0) allows the extraction of all the different complexity metrics proposed in the literature,some of them with customisable parameters. TCoMX is compatible with DICOM RT-PLAN files generated using both RayStation (RaySearch Laboratories, Stockholm, Sweden) and Precision (Accuray, Sunnyvale, CA) TPSs. It was developed entirely on Matlab® R2020b. The backward compatibility with previous Matlab® releases was checked up to version R2018a. Compatibility with older versions should be guaranteed but needs to be verified. The library was developed on Linux Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and the compatibility with Windows 10 was verified. The compatibility with other versions of the two operating systems as well as with other operating systems needs to be investigated. A reference dataset composed by 18 anonymized DICOM RT- PLAN files (9 Precision, 9 RayStation) is also provided in this repository. We refer to the TCoMX_UserManual in this repository for any detail concerning its functioning.
TCoMX was realized in order to provide common tool to be used across the different institutions. A strong effort was done to make the library accessible to any type of user, even to non expert programmers. Furthermore, no fees are needed to use it because we believe that science is based on the free sharing of knowledge and on making tools accessible to everyone. For this reason, TCoMX is released under a GNU GPL v3 licence that allow you to use and modify it, as well as to distribute new versions of the library by following two simple rules (1) give to the others the same freedom you received from us (2) state all the changes you perform (please find all the technical details in the LICENCE file). However, in the same spirit of sharing knowledge, we warmly encourage the authors that are interested in adding new interesting and useful features to the library to contact us in order to set up a collaboration and keep this repository always updated. Finally, we are fully available to help you in the installation and/or execution of the library as well as to solve possible bugs that might arise.
Please cite the library in your works as:
Cavinato, S, Fusella, M, Paiusco, M, Scaggion, A. Quantitative assessment of helical tomotherapy plans complexity. J Appl Clin Med Phys. 2022;e13781. https://doi.org/10.1002/acm2.13781
and
Cavinato S, Scaggion A. TCoMX: Tomotherapy Complexity Metrics EXtractor. ArXiv211215056 Phys. Published online December 30, 2021. Accessed January 7, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.15056
and, if you want, by adding the link to this repository: https://github.com/SamueleCavinato/TCoMX
If you need other citation formats, you can refer to https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acm2.13781 and to the updated version of the TCoMX User Manual at http://arxiv.org/abs/2112.15056
We are planning to add a secion "Results" to the TCoMX User Manual in order to collect all the relevant findings obtained using TCoMX, with the reference to the work were they are published. Therefore, if you publish some results obtained using TCoMX and you want us to add them to dedicated section in the TCoMX User Manual, do not hesitate to contact us. This might also help you to gain visibility.
Please send any correspondence to samuele.cavinato@iov.veneto.it or alessandro.scaggion@iov.veneto.it.
TCoMX is intended for research use only. The clinical use of TCoMX is strongly forbidden. The authors don't take responsabilities of any improper use of the tools contained in this repository and of all the material related to it.