BreastWatch: A Varian Eclipse script tool for Community-Based automatic evaluation of breast treatment plans

Area of Science:

• Radiation Oncology
• Medical Physics
• Computational Biology

Background:

• External Beam Breast Treatment (EBBT) planning requires meticulous adherence to protocol dose-constraints.
• Current methods for evaluating EBBT plans can be time-consuming and may have limitations in capturing real-world plan variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce BreastWatch, a Varian Eclipse script tool for automated inspection and improvement of EBBT plans.
• To enhance EBBT plan evaluation through automatic assessment of protocol dose-constraints and a novel Community-Based approach.

Main Methods:

• BreastWatch automatically evaluates EBBT plans and plan sums against international protocol dose-constraints (e.g., NRG RTOG1005, ICR FAST).
• A Community-Based (CB) approach exports plan data to create a library, enabling comparison against statistical distributions of similar plans.
• The script provides visual feedback (traffic lights, BW-SCORE) and a CB-SCORE to complement protocol-based evaluations.

Main Results:

• BreastWatch significantly speeds up the EBBT planning process.
• The tool improves treatment plan quality, including PTV coverage, OAR sparing, and inter-planner consistency.
• Preliminary analysis suggests the CB approach leads to improved and more consistent dose-constraint values.

Conclusions:

• BreastWatch is an effective tool for the automatic evaluation of Varian Eclipse EBBT plans.
• The integration of protocol-based and Community-Based features offers a simple yet powerful automation strategy for optimizing EBBT planning.