A physics guided neural network approach for dose prediction in automated radiation therapy treatment planning

Abstract

Radiotherapy treatment planning is a complex and time consuming process prone to differences as result of choices of individual planners. Autoplanning systems have been introduced to both reduce the time consumption and to counteract the influence of individual planning choices. Although autoplanning generally increases performance of the treatment plans, the plans still need to be checked manually to ensure plan accuracy. Increasing plan consistency with knowledge based planning (KBP) or automatic plan evaluation would be clear ways to improve upon this problem. For both improvements, deep learning can be an important tool to produce accurate and fast 3D dose distributions. In this study such a deep learning tool is developed in two parts to accommodate this.
In the first part a structure based deep learning model, using a U-Net architecture is developed, used for dose distribution prediction for prostate patients treated with volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) plans, generated by autoplanning. Different loss functions have been tested to see which achieve the best results. In the second part physics information is included in the neural network prediction by using a hybrid physics-data approach. For this, an approximate dose distribution, the segment dose, is used as extra input for the dose prediction network. This segment dose is created by predicting multi leaf collimator (MLC) positions and reconstructing the corresponding dose with a simple dose engine. The predictions are evaluated using several dose characteristics, dose volume histogram (DVH) curves and other clinically relevant metrics. The U-Net architecture proved able to accurately predict the dose of patients in the test set. The best performing loss function for accurate dose characteristics prediction was found to be the weighted mean squared error (WMSE) loss, which predicted several PTV DVH statistics within a 1.5 % error and the rectum statistics within 3.5 % error. Furthermore, the model predicts the DVH points of the PTV within 0.84 ± 0.40 Gy average absolute dose difference and the rectum in 0.91 ± 0.72 Gy average dose difference. The hybrid physics-data model did not improve the prediction accuracy of the dose prediction model in terms of DVH statistics and DVH prediction, as the MLC positions could not be predicted accurately enough. The performance of the structure based prediction is similar to the performance of state-of-the-art prediction models. Although the hybrid model with the predicted segment doses did not improve the prediction accuracy, a significant effect could be seen from using the correct MLC positions instead. The bottleneck of the prediction is therefore identified to be the segment prediction. As such, it would be interesting to focus on segment prediction in follow up research.