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Updated: Jun 1, 2026
Radiation Planning Assistant - A Streamlined, Fully Automated Radiotherapy Treatment Planning System
Published on: April 11, 2018
Dentalmaps: automatic dental delineation for radiotherapy planning in head-and-neck cancer
Juliette Thariat1, Liliane Ramus, Philippe Maingon
1Department of Radiation Oncology/Institut de biologie et developpement du cancer (IBDC) centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) unite mixte de recherche (UMR) 6543, Cancer Center Antoine-Lacassagne, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, Nice Cedex, France. jthariat@hotmail.com
Purpose:
To propose an automatic atlas-based segmentation framework of the dental structures, called Dentalmaps, and to assess its accuracy and relevance to guide dental care in the context of intensity-modulated radiotherapy.
Methods And Materials:
A multi-atlas-based segmentation, less sensitive to artifacts than previously published head-and-neck segmentation methods, was used. The manual segmentations of a 21-patient database were first deformed onto the query using nonlinear registrations with the training images and then fused to estimate the consensus segmentation of the query.
Results:
The framework was evaluated with a leave-one-out protocol. The maximum doses estimated using manual contours were considered as ground truth and compared with the maximum doses estimated using automatic contours. The dose estimation error was within 2-Gy accuracy in 75% of cases (with a median of 0.9 Gy), whereas it was within 2-Gy accuracy in 30% of cases only with the visual estimation method without any contour, which is the routine practice procedure.
Conclusions:
Dose estimates using this framework were more accurate than visual estimates without dental contour. Dentalmaps represents a useful documentation and communication tool between radiation oncologists and dentists in routine practice. Prospective multicenter assessment is underway on patients extrinsic to the database.
