Clinical application of a template-guided automated planning routine

Area of Science:

• Radiation Oncology
• Medical Physics
• Radiotherapy Planning

Background:

• Manual radiotherapy treatment planning is time-consuming and can be subject to inter-observer variability.
• Automated planning tools aim to improve efficiency and consistency in treatment delivery.
• Template-based approaches offer a structured method for automating complex planning tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the dosimetric quality of template-based automated radiotherapy planning.
• To quantify the reduction in treatment planning time using an automated application.
• To assess the consistency of automated plan generation compared to manual methods.

Main Methods:

• Development of QuickPlan, a software application integrated with a treatment planning system for automated planning.
• Utilized configurable templates for contouring, structure matching, field design, and algorithm settings.
• Compared automated plans (n=22 patients) against manual replanning and evaluated planning time for 32 patients.

Main Results:

• Automated plans showed minor, clinically insignificant dosimetric differences compared to manual plans.
• Significantly decreased values were observed for target dose to 2% volume and homogeneity index in automated plans.
• Median reduction in treatment plan generation time was 9 minutes 50 seconds (±4 minutes 33 seconds).

Conclusions:

• Template-based automated planning provides reduced planning time with consistent plan generation.
• Dosimetric quality is comparable to manual planning, with some metrics showing improvement.
• The automated planning process demonstrates potential for expansion to various disease sites in radiation therapy.