Advances in automatic delineation of target volume and cardiac substructure in breast cancer radiotherapy (Review)

Abstract

Postoperative adjuvant radiotherapy plays an important role in the treatment of patients with breast cancer. With the continuous development of radiotherapeutic technologies, the requirements for radiotherapeutic accuracy are increasingly high. The accuracy of target volume and organ at risk delineation significantly affects the effect of radiotherapy. Automatic delineation software has been continuously developed for the automatic delineation of target areas and organs at risk. Automatic segmentation based on an atlas and deep learning is a hot topic in current clinical research. Automatic delineation can not only reduce the workload and delineation times, but also establish a uniform delineation standard and reduce inter-observer and intra-observer differences. In patients with breast cancer, especially in patients who undergo left breast radiotherapy, the protection of the heart is particularly important. Treating the whole heart as an organ at risk cannot meet the clinical needs, and it is necessary to limit the dose to specific cardiac substructures. The present review discusses the importance of automatic delineation of target volume and cardiac substructure in radiotherapy for patients with breast cancer. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Automatic delineation technology of target volume in radiotherapy for breast cancer 3. Differences in the recognition of cardiac substructures by different automatic delineation techniques 4. Conclusions

Clinical Feasibility of Artificial Intelligence-Based Autosegmentation of the Left Anterior Descending Artery in Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer

“…Several models have been frequently used for the AI contouring of OAR and assessing clinical target volumes (CTVs). Convolutional neural networks (CNN) with a U-Net architecture 6 have been shown to have a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of greater than 0.80 on average while segmenting organs such as the heart, lungs, esophagus, and spinal cord. 5 Autosegmentation software Workflow Box, Embrace CT , and DLC Expert offer a DSC of 0.95 for the whole heart and 0.80 for the four cardiac chambers 7 ; 0.96 for the heart, 0.98 for the lungs, and 0.82 for the spinal cord 8 ; and 0.96 for the heart, 0.98 for the lungs, and 0.86 for the spinal cord, 8 respectively.…”