The Jacobian as a measure of planar dose congruence

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Jacobian-based measure for comparing dose distributions in therapeutic radiation physics, offering a normalization-independent, parameter-free, and bounded metric that converges to a unique value for unrelated distributions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Jacobian-based measure for dose comparison that is normalization-independent and free of tunable parameters, improving robustness and consistency.

Findings

The measure is normalization independent.

It is free of tunable parameters.

It converges to a unique value for unrelated distributions.

Abstract

We propose a new starting point for comparing dose distributions in therapeutic radiation physics using a Jacobian-based measure. The measure is normalization independent, free of tunable parameters, bounded and converges to a unique value when comparing unrelated dose distributions. We present a preliminary demonstration of the sensitivity and general characteristics of this measure.