Deformable dose prediction network based on hybrid 2D and 3D convolution for nasopharyngeal carcinoma radiotherapy

Radiotherapy is recognized as the primary treatment for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Rapid and accurate dose prediction is crucial for enhancing the quality and efficiency of radiotherapy planning. However, the current dose prediction model based on 2D architecture cannot effectively learn the spatial information among slices. Although some studies have explored the incorporation of interslice features through 3D architecture, the resolution properties of medical image anisotropy significantly limit the predictive performance. To address the issues, we propose a novel deformable dose prediction network based on hybrid 2D and 3D convolution for NPC radiotherapy. Specifically, the proposed model innovatively incorporates a 2.5D architecture based on hybrid 2D and 3D convolution, and effectively utilizes the directional information within anisotropic resolutions to achieve cross-scale feature extraction. Additionally, deformable convolution is introduced into the model to enhance the receptive field and effectively handle multi-scale spatial transformations. To improve channel correlation and reduce redundant features, we design a Residual Deformable Squeeze-and-Excitation Module. We conduct extensive experiments on an internal dataset, and the results show that the proposed model outperforms other existing methods in most dosimetric criteria. The proposed model has superior dose prediction performance in NPC radiotherapy, and has important clinical significance for assisting physicists to optimize the treatment plan and improve standardization of radiotherapy planning. The source code is available at https://github.com/CDUTJ102/2.5D-Deformable-UNet .