Artificial Intelligence for Outcome Modeling in Radiotherapy

Outcome modeling plays an important role in personalizing radiotherapy and finds applications in specialized areas such as adaptive radiotherapy. Conventional outcome models that are based on a simplified understanding of radiobiological effects or empirical fitting often only consider dosimetric information. However, it is recognized that response to radiotherapy is multi-factorial and involves a complex interaction of radiation therapy, patient and treatment factors, and the tumor microenvironment. Recently, large pools of patient-specific biological and imaging data have become available with the development of advanced biotechnology and multi-modality imaging techniques. Given this complexity, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are valuable to make sense of such a plethora of heterogeneous data and to aid clinicians in their decision-making process. The role of AI/ML has been demonstrated in many retrospective studies and more recently prospective evidence has been emerging as well to support AI/ML for personalized and precision radiotherapy.