Performing large-scale three-dimensional radiation dose reconstruction for patients requires a large amount of manual work. We present an image processing-based pipeline to automatically reconstruct radiation dose. The pipeline was designed for childhood cancer survivors that received abdominal radiotherapy with anterior-to-posterior and posterior-to-anterior field set-up. First, anatomical landmarks are automatically identified on two-dimensional radiographs. Second, these landmarks are used to derive parameters to emulate the geometry of the plan on a surrogate computed tomography. Finally, the plan is emulated and used as input for dose calculation. For qualitative evaluation, 100 cases of automatic and manual plan emulations were assessed by two experienced radiation dosimetrists in a blinded comparison. The two radiation dosimetrists approved 100%/100% and 92%/91% of the automatic/manual plan emulations, respectively. Similar approval rates of 100% and 94% hold when the automatic pipeline is applied on another 50 cases. Further, quantitative comparisons resulted in on average <5 mm difference in plan isocenter/borders, and <0.9 Gy in organ mean dose (prescribed dose: 14.4 Gy) calculated from the automatic and manual plan emulations. No statistically significant difference in terms of dose reconstruction accuracy was found for most organs at risk. Ultimately, our automatic pipeline results are of sufficient quality to enable effortless scaling of dose reconstruction data generation.@en

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to improve upon a recently introduced bi-objective treatment planning method for prostate high-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy (BT), both in terms of resulting plan quality and runtime requirements, to the extent that its execution time is clinically acceptable. Methods: Bi-objective treatment planning is done using a state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithm, which produces a large number of potential treatment plans with different trade-offs between coverage of the target volumes and sparing organs at risk. A graphics processing unit (GPU) is used for large-scale parallelization of dose calculations and the calculation of the dose-volume (DV) indices of potential treatment plans. Moreover, the objectives of the previously used bi-objective optimization model are modified to produce better results. Results: We applied the GPU-accelerated bi-objective treatment planning method to a set of 18 patients, resulting in a set containing a few hundred potential treatment plans with different trade-offs for each of these patients. Due to accelerations introduced in this article, results previously achieved after 1 hour are now achieved within 30 seconds of optimization. We found plans satisfying the clinical protocol for 15 of 18 patients, whereas this was the case for only 4 of 18 clinical plans. Higher quality treatment plans are obtained when the accuracy of DV index calculation is increased using more dose calculation points, requiring still no more than 3 minutes of optimization for 100 000 points. Conclusions: Large sets of high-quality treatment plans that trade-off coverage and sparing are now achievable within 30 seconds, due to the GPU-acceleration of a previously introduced bi-objective treatment planning method for prostate HDR brachytherapy. Higher quality plans can be achieved when optimizing for 3 minutes, which we still consider to be clinically acceptable. This allows for more insightful treatment plan selection in a clinical setting.

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In retrospective radiation treatment (RT) dosimetry, a surrogate anatomy is often used for patients without 3D CT. To gain insight in what the crucial aspects in a surrogate anatomy are to enable accurate dose reconstruction, we investigated the relation of patient characteristics and internal anatomical features with deviations in reconstructed organ dose using surrogate patient's CT scans. Abdominal CT scans of 35 childhood cancer patients (age: 2.1-5.6 yr; 17 boys, 18 girls) undergoing RT during 2004-2016 were included. Based on whether an intact right or left kidney is present in the CT scan, two groups were formed each containing 24 patients. From each group, four CTs associated with Wilms' tumor RT plans with an anterior-posterior - posterior-anterior field setup were selected as references. For each reference, a 2D digitally reconstructed radiograph was computed from the reference CT to simulate a 2D radiographic image and dose reconstruction was performed on the other CTs in the respective group. Deviations in organ mean dose (DE _mean ) of the reconstructions versus the references were calculated, as were deviations in patient characteristics (i.e. age, height, weight) and in anatomical features including organ volume, location (in 3D), and spatial overlaps. Per reference, the Pearson's correlation coefficient between deviations in DE _mean and patient characteristics/features were studied. Deviation in organ locations and DE _mean for the liver, spleen, and right kidney were moderately correlated (R ²

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3D dose reconstruction for radiotherapy (RT) is the estimation of the 3D radiation dose distribution patients received during RT. Big dose reconstruction data is needed to accurately model the relationship between the dose and onset of adverse effects, to ultimately gain insights and improve today's treatments. Dose reconstruction is often performed by emulating the original RT plan on a surrogate anatomy for dose estimation. This is especially essential for historically treated patients with long-Term follow-up, as solely 2D radiographs were used for RT planning, and no 3D imaging was acquired for these patients. Performing dose reconstruction for a large group of patients requires a large amount of manual work, where the geometry of the original RT plan is emulated on the surrogate anatomy, by visually comparing the latter with the original 2D radiograph of the patient. This is a labor-intensive process that for practical use needs to be automated. This work presents an image-processing pipeline to automatically emulate plans on surrogate computational tomography (CT) scans. The pipeline was designed for childhood cancer survivors that historically received abdominal RT with anterior-To-posterior and posterior-To-Anterior RT field set-up. First, anatomical landmarks are automatically identified on 2D radiographs. Next, these landmarks are used to derive parameters needed to finally emulate the plan on a surrogate CT. Validation was performed by an experienced RT planner, visually assessing 12 cases of automatic plan emulations. Automatic emulations were approved 11 out of 12 times. This work paves the way to effortless scaling of dose reconstruction data generation.

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Purpose: Bi-objective treatment planning for high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy is a novel treatment planning method with two separate objectives that represent target coverage and organ-at-risk sparing. In this study, we investigated the feasibility and plan quality of this method by means of a retrospective observer study. Methods and Materials: Current planning sessions were recorded to configure a bi-objective optimization model and to assess its applicability to our clinical practice. Optimization software, GOMEA, was then used to automatically generate a large set of plans with different trade-offs in the two objectives for each of 18 patients treated with high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy. From this set, five plans per patient were selected for comparison to the clinical plan in terms of satisfaction of planning criteria and in a retrospective observer study. Three brachytherapists were asked to evaluate the blinded plans and select the preferred one. Results: Recordings demonstrated applicability of the bi-objective optimization model to our clinical practice. For 14/18 patients, GOMEA plans satisfied all planning criteria, compared with 4/18 clinical plans. In the observer study, in 53/54 cases, a GOMEA plan was preferred over the clinical plan. When asked for consensus among observers, this ratio was 17/18 patients. Observers highly appreciated the insight gained from comparing multiple plans with different trade-offs simultaneously. Conclusions: The bi-objective optimization model adapted well to our clinical practice. GOMEA plans were considered equal or superior to the clinical plans. In addition, presenting multiple high-quality plans provided novel insight into patient-specific trade-offs.

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Purpose: To investigate the variation in computed dose-volume (DV) indices for high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy that can result from typical differences in computation settings in treatment planning systems (TPSs). Methods: Five factors were taken into account: number of dose-calculation points, radioactive source description, interpolation between delineated contours, intersections between delineated organ contours, and organ shape at the top and bottom contour using either full or partial slice thickness. Using in-house developed software, the DV indices of the treatment plans of 26 patients were calculated with different settings, and compared to a baseline setting that closely followed the default settings of the TPS used in our medical center. Studied organs were prostate and seminal vesicles, denoted as targets, and bladder, rectum, and urethra, denoted as organs at risk (OARs), which were delineated on MRI scans with a 3.3 mm slice thickness. Results: When sampling a fixed number of points in each organ, in order to achieve a width of the 95% confidence interval over all patients of the DV indices of 1% or less, only 32,000 points had to be sampled per target, but 256,000 points had to be sampled per OAR. For the remaining factors, DV indices changed up to 0.4% for rectum, 1.3% for urethra, and 2.6% for prostate. DV indices of the bladder changed especially if the high-dose-region was (partly) located at the most caudal contour, up to 8.5%, and DV indices of the vesicles changed especially if there were few delineated contours, up to 9.8%, both due to the use of full slice thickness for the top and bottom contour. Conclusions: The values of DV indices used in prostate HDR brachytherapy treatment planning are influenced by the computation settings in a TPS, especially at the most caudal part of the bladder, as well as in the seminal vesicles.

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The importance and potential of Gray-Box Optimization (GBO) with evolutionary algorithms is becoming increasingly clear lately both for benchmark and real-world problems. We consider the GBO setting where partial evaluations are possible, meaning that sub-functions of the evaluation function are known and can be exploited to improve optimization efficiency. In this paper, we show that the efficiency of GBO can be greatly improved through large-scale parallelism, exploiting the fact that each evaluation function requires the calculation of a number of independent sub-functions. This is especially interesting for real-world problems where often the majority of the computational effort is spent on the evaluation function. Moreover, we show how the best parallelization technique largely depends on factors including the number of sub-functions and their required computation time, revealing that for different parts of the optimization the best parallelization technique should be selected based on these factors. As an illustration, we show how large-scale parallelization can be applied to optimization of high-dose-rate brachytherapy treatment plans for prostate cancer. We find that use of a modern Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was the most efficient parallelization technique in all realistic scenarios, leading to substantial speed-ups up to a factor of 73.@en

The recently introduced Gene-pool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm for Genetic Programming (GP-GOMEA) has been shown to find much smaller solutions of equally high quality compared to other state-of-the-art GP approaches. This is an interesting aspect as small solutions better enable human interpretation. In this paper, an adaptation of GP-GOMEA to tackle real-world symbolic regression is proposed, in order to find small yet accurate mathematical expressions, and with an application to a problem of clinical interest. For radiotherapy dose reconstruction, a model is sought that captures anatomical patient similarity. This problem is particularly interesting because while features are patient-specific, the variable to regress is a distance, and is defined over patient pairs. We show that on benchmark problems as well as on the application, GP-GOMEA outperforms variants of standard GP. To find even more accurate models, we further consider an evolutionary meta learning approach, where GP-GOMEA is used to construct small, yet effective features for a different machine learning algorithm. Experimental results show how this approach significantly improves the performance of linear regression, support vector machines, and random forest, while providing meaningful and interpretable features.

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Purpose: The aim of this study is to establish the first step toward a novel and highly individualized three-dimensional (3D) dose distribution reconstruction method, based on CT scans and organ delineations of recently treated patients. Specifically, the feasibility of automatically selecting the CT scan of a recently treated childhood cancer patient who is similar to a given historically treated child who suffered from Wilms’ tumor is assessed. Methods: A cohort of 37 recently treated children between 2- and 6-yr old are considered. Five potential notions of ground-truth similarity are proposed, each focusing on different anatomical aspects. These notions are automatically computed from CT scans of the abdomen and 3D organ delineations (liver, spleen, spinal cord, external body contour). The first is based on deformable image registration, the second on the Dice similarity coefficient, the third on the Hausdorff distance, the fourth on pairwise organ distances, and the last is computed by means of the overlap volume histogram. The relationship between typically available features of historically treated patients and the proposed ground-truth notions of similarity is studied by adopting state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, including random forest. Also, the feasibility of automatically selecting the most similar patient is assessed by comparing ground-truth rankings of similarity with predicted rankings. Results: Similarities (mainly) based on the external abdomen shape and on the pairwise organ distances are highly correlated (Pearson r_p ≥ 0.70) and are successfully modeled with random forests based on historically recorded features (pseudo-R² ≥ 0.69). In contrast, similarities based on the shape of internal organs cannot be modeled. For the similarities that random forest can reliably model, an estimation of feature relevance indicates that abdominal diameters and weight are the most important. Experiments on automatically selecting similar patients lead to coarse, yet quite robust results: the most similar patient is retrieved only 22% of the times, however, the error in worst-case scenarios is limited, with the fourth most similar patient being retrieved. Conclusions: Results demonstrate that automatically selecting similar patients is feasible when focusing on the shape of the external abdomen and on the position of internal organs. Moreover, whereas the common practice in phantom-based dose reconstruction is to select a representative phantom using age, height, and weight as discriminant factors for any treatment scenario, our analysis on abdominal tumor treatment for children shows that the most relevant features are weight and the anterior–posterior and left–right abdominal diameters.

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We address the problemof high-dose-rate brachytherapy treatment planning for prostate cancer. The problem involves determining a treatment plan consisting of the so-called dwell times that a radiation source resides at different positions inside the patient such that the prostate volume and the seminal vesicles are covered by the prescribed radiation dose level as much as possiblewhile the organs at risk, e.g., bladder, rectum, and urethra, are irradiated as little as possible. The problem is highly constrained, following clinical requirements for radiation dose distributionwhile the planning process for treatment planners to design a clinically-Acceptable treatment plan is strictly time-limited. In this paper, we propose that the problem can be formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem that intuitively describes trade-offs between target volumes to be radiated and organs to be spared. We solve this problem with the recently-introduced Multi-Objective Real-Valued Genepool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm (MO-RV-GOMEA), which is a promising MOEA that is able to effectively exploit dependencies between problem variables to tackle complicated problems in the continuous domain. MO-RV-GOMEA also has the capability to perform partial evaluations if problem structures allow local variations in existing solutions to be efficiently computed, substantially accelerating the overall optimization performance. Experiments on real medical data and comparison with state-of-Theart MOEAs confirm our claims.@en