Copenhagen, Denmark
Onsite/Online

ESTRO 2022

Session Item

Implementation of new technology and techniques
7002
Poster (digital)
Physics
Influence of training data variability on deep learning dose prediction robustness for MR-guided RT
Marcel Nachbar, Germany
PO-1637

Abstract

Influence of training data variability on deep learning dose prediction robustness for MR-guided RT
Authors:

Marcel Nachbar1, Simon Gutwein1, Moritz Schneider1, Daniel Zips2, Christian Baumgartner3, Daniela Thorwarth1

1University Hospital and Medical Faculty, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Section for Biomedical Physics, Department of Radiation Oncology, Tübingen, Germany; 2University Hospital and Medical Faculty, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Department of Radiation Oncology, Tübingen, Germany; 3Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Cluster of Excellence “Machine Learning”, Tübingen, Germany

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Purpose or Objective

Deep learning (DL) based dose predictions are promising for real-time dose calculation and open thus new possibilities towards adaptive radiotherapy. However, the accuracy of pretrained DL models remains unclear if conditions between training data and applied data change. Different conditions may include tumor entity, source-to-surface distance (SSD), field size and shape, gantry angle and tissue density. In this work, we therefore developed a DL dose prediction model and investigated the robustness and risks of dose prediction on unseen data.

Material and Methods

A DL framework was developed to predict dose distributions based on patient CT and radiation field information. Two training datasets were defined based on clinical MR-Linac treatment plans of (A) 40 primary prostate cancer patients and (B) 40 patients with either prostate, head & neck, mamma or liver cancers. Both training sets corresponded to ~2000 individual segments from different angles. Gold standard dose distributions, used as target for model training and testing, were obtained by segment-wise Monte Carlo (MC) dose simulation using a dedicated EGSnrc MR-Linac model [1]. The training datasets were used to train two separate 3D U-Net for dose prediction. For evaluation, both trained models were applied to data representing three different conditions: (1) A set of 5 unseen prostate plans, (2) 5 head & neck, mamma and liver cancer plans each and (3) 15 lymph-node plans, for which the conditions were unseen by both models. The DL dose predictions were compared against gold standard using gamma analysis (3mm/3%, 40% cutoff) and evaluated by Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Results

Both DL models were successfully trained and allowed for segment-wise dose prediction (fig. 1).


Training dataset (A) compared against (1) presented with a median [range] pass rate of 98.0% [85.3-100%], whereas for the changed test sets it decreased to 72.4% [53.8-91.6%] (2) and 85.9% [63.8-98.2%] (3) (fig. 2).


In comparison the mixed model (B) applied to the test datasets (1), (2) and (3) yielded median gamma pass rates of 98.6% [92.9-100%], 92.9% [79.6-100%] and 94.2% [66.6-100%], respectively, resulting in an improvement of 0.6% (p=n.s.), 20.5% (p<0.001) and 8.3% (p=0.001).

Conclusion

This study showed that accuracy of DL dose predictions strongly depends on the conditions represented in the training dataset. While for seen conditions the DL model predicted dose distributions correctly, unseen conditions may pose a risk. However, with increasing diversity within the training dataset, even unseen conditions might be better predictable. Therefore, potential next steps are to increase diversity within the training data by deviating from clinically used segments and defining artificial segments to increase robustness.

 

References:

[1] Friedel M et al. Med Phys 2019.

Funding: German Research Council (DFG ZI 736/2-1)