Autoplanning for brachytherapy: Does it work?
Rik Bijman,
The Netherlands
SP-0207
Abstract
Autoplanning for brachytherapy: Does it work?
1Erasmus Medical Center, Radiotherapy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
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Abstract Text
After all the promising results and years of experience with automated treatment planning in EBRT including several different techniques such as IMRT, VMAT, IMPT, SBRT, etc. it is a logical step to explore automated treatment planning for brachytherapy (BT). Several implementations have been proposed in the literature (i.e ISPA, HIPO, GOMEA), all with their benefits and drawbacks. At our institute we developed software for automated multi-criterial optimization for EBRT fluence map optimization, Erasmus-iCycle. With Erasmus-iCycle, fully automated and high quality treatment plans were generated for a large variety of EBRT treatment sites and modalities. Recently its functionality was extended with BT dwell time optimization (BiCycle) for a set of fixed dwell positions distributed over the intracavitary, ovoids and needles. The software is wish-list driven and capable of optimizing simultaneously dosimetrical and geometrical (i.e. dwell time distribution) aims. The system has been validated in the past for prostate cancer and cervical cancer. The promising results showed that autoplanning for brachytherapy in principle works and made us move forward to use this in clinic. As a next step we initiated a prospective validation study. For this we developed and validated a wish-list for BT applied to locally advanced cervical cancer patients that adheres to the clinically applied EMBRACE II protocol and the planning philosophy. We then used the validated wish-list to generate, in parallel to and without any interaction with the clinical workflow, a fully automatically generated Bicycle plan. Quantitative and qualitative plan evaluations were performed as well as a manual finetuning performed by the treating physician. The results of the study will show if Bicycle is capable of generating clinicaly feasible and optimal treatment plans within a clinical setting and timeframe. The prelimary study results will be presented during the talk.