Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Author Spotlight: Improving Radiation Therapy Access with Radiation Planning Assistant
Published on: October 6, 2023
DR-only Carbon-ion radiotherapy treatment planning via deep learning
Xinyang Zhang1, Pengbo He1, Yazhou Li2
1Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China; Key Laboratory of Heavy Ion Radiation Biology and Medicine of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China; Key Laboratory of Basic Research on Heavy Ion Radiation Application in Medicine, Gansu Province, Lanzhou 730000, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Purpose:
To evaluate the feasibility of patient-specific digital radiography (DR)-only treatment planning for carbon ion radiotherapy in anthropomorphic thorax-and-abdomen phantom and head-and-neck patients.
Methods:
The study was conducted on the anthropomorphic phantom and head-and-neck patients. We collected computed tomography (CT) and DR images of the phantom and cone beam CT (CBCT) and DR images of the patients, respectively. Two different deep neural networks were established to correlate the relationships between DR and digitally reconstructed radiograph (DRR) images, as well as DRR and CT images. The similarity between CT and predicted CT images was evaluated by computing the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM), respectively. Dose calculations on the predicted CT images were compared against the true CT-based dose distributions for carbon-ion radiotherapy treatment planning with intensity-modulated pencil-beam spot scanning. Relative dose differences in the target volumes and organ-at-risks were computed and three-dimensional gamma analyses (3 mm, 3%) were performed.
Results:
The average MAE, RMSE, PSNR and SSIM of the framework were 0.007, 0.144, 37.496 and 0.973, respectively. The average relative dose differences between the predicted CT- and CT-based dose distributions at the same carbon-ion irradiation settings for the phantom and the patients were <2% and ≤4%, respectively. The average gamma pass-rates were >98% for the predicted CT-based versus CT-based carbon ion plans of the phantom and the patients.
Conclusion:
We have demonstrated the feasibility of a patient-specific DR-only treatment planning workflow for heavy ion radiotherapy by using deep learning approach.
