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Surrogate-free machine learning-based organ dose reconstruction for pediatric abdominal radiotherapy

Physics in Medicine and Biology, vol. 65, pp. 245021

Abstract

To study radiotherapy-related adverse effects, detailed dose information (3D distribution) is needed for accurate dose-effect modeling. For childhood cancer survivors who underwent radiotherapy in the pre-CT era, only 2D radiographs were acquired, thus 3D dose distributions must be reconstructed from limited information. State-of-the-art methods achieve this by using 3D surrogate anatomies. These can however lack personalization and lead to coarse reconstructions. We present and validate a surrogate-free dose reconstruction method based on Machine Learning (ML). Abdominal planning CTs (n = 142) of recently-treated childhood cancer patients were gathered, their organs at risk were segmented, and 300 artificial Wilms' tumor plans were sampled automatically. Each artificial plan was automatically emulated on the 142 CTs, resulting in 42,600 3D dose distributions from which dose-volume metrics were derived. Anatomical features were extracted from digitally reconstructed radiographs simulated from the CTs to resemble historical radiographs. Further, patient and radiotherapy plan features typically available from historical treatment records were collected. An evolutionary ML algorithm was then used to link features to dose-volume metrics. Besides 5-fold cross validation, a further evaluation was done on an independent dataset of five CTs each associated with two clinical plans. Cross-validation resulted in mean absolute errors ≤ 0.6 Gy for organs completely inside or outside the field. For organs positioned at the edge of the field, mean absolute errors ≤ 1.7 Gy for [Formula: see text], ≤ 2.9 Gy for [Formula: see text], and ≤ 13% for [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], were obtained, without systematic bias. Similar results were found for the independent dataset. To conclude, we proposed a novel organ dose reconstruction method that uses ML models to predict dose-volume metric values given patient and plan features. Our approach is not only accurate, but also efficient, as the setup of a surrogate is no longer needed.

Authors 14

  1. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

    Affiliation as printed

    Life Sciences and Health Group, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, The Netherlands

    shared first authorship, the two authors contributed equally to this work

    Life Sciences and Health Group, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the Netherlands

  2. Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    shared first authorship, the two authors contributed equally to this work

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  3. Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  4. Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  5. Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  6. University Medical Center Utrecht

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiotherapy, University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiotherapy, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands

  7. University Medical Center Utrecht · Princess Máxima Center

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiotherapy, University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Princess Màxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiotherapy, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Princess Màxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, the Netherlands

  8. University of Manchester · Cancer Research UK Manchester Centre

    Affiliation as printed

    Manchester Cancer Research Centre, Division of Cancer Sciences, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

  9. Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Canada

  10. Institute of Oncology Ljubljana

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Institute of Oncology Ljubljana, Slovenia

  11. Leiden University Medical Center · Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands

  12. Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  13. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica · Delft University of Technology

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Software Technology, Algorithmics Group, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

    Life Sciences and Health Group, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, The Netherlands

    Department of Software Technology, Algorithmics Group, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

    Life Sciences and Health Group, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the Netherlands

  14. Leiden University Medical Center · Amsterdam University Medical Centers · University of Amsterdam

    Affiliation as printed

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands

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References 45