Automatic field shaping for conformal radiation therapy

A computer method has been developed to shape the radiation field to conform to the shape of the target as visualized through the beam's eye view (BEV) perspective for conformal radiation therapy. Initially, a series of 2D target contours to define the target size are input into the computer. These target contour data are mapped onto a 3D surface and thereafter projected onto a BEV plane. The projection's outer boundary of the target is auto-contoured. After auto-contouring, a margin is automatically added to define the radiation beam cross section. Since the BEV plane is arbitrarily oriented about the target, the beam orientation can be non-coplanar to the plane of the target contours. For a chosen beam orientation, the conformal treatment beam cross section can be generated automatically using this computer technique and output to either a laser printer, a plotter or stored on files for transfer to the linear accelerator computer system.