eContouring Overview

To address the growing need of additional contouring training in the radiation oncology community, ASTRO began offering hands-on contouring courses lead by expert radiation oncologists, radiologists and surgeons.

Cases from various disease sites are presented with the contours of expert faculty outlining normal and diseased tissues.  Participants are given a set of structures to contour and then have the ability to turn the expert’s contours on to see a comparison between the participant and expert’s contours.  Participants are also given a score to quantify how close their contours came to the expert’s contours.

Current eContouring Offerings

Project Introduction

This project outlines how participants can use the ASTRO’s live on-site or online eContouring events towards fulfilling the Part IV Practice Quality Improvement (PQI) Maintenance of Certification (MOC) requirements that have been established by the American Board of Radiology (ABR). This project is based on the ABR’s four-part Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) process for continuous quality improvement. Participants will link two PDSA cycles together to create an action-oriented improvement plan that assesses the effects of their quality improvement strategy.

In the first PDSA cycle, participants will use the pre-event eContouring homework to develop baseline data to contour specific structures, evaluate their performance, and develop a performance improvement plan. In the second PDSA cycle, participants will re-measure their performance on the same contouring case and structures and evaluate their performance outcomes to see if their performance goals were met. The project concludes with a written participant reflection.

Administration

Participants are responsible for documenting the project according to the outline, and must personally attest to its completion on the myABR website in accordance with the ABR’s MOC requirements. While ASTRO is able to confirm a facility’s participation in a live eContouring event, ASTRO will not be collecting, reviewing, or validating PQI projects.

Download the eContouring PQI Template