Predicting treatment plan approval probability for high-dose-rate brachytherapy of cervical cancer using adversarial deep learning

Abstract

Objective: Predicting the probability of having the plan approved by the physician is important for automatic treatment planning. Driven by the mathematical foundation of deep learning that can use a deep neural network to represent functions accurately and flexibly, we developed a deep-learning framework that learns the probability of plan approval for cervical cancer high-dose-rate brachytherapy (HDRBT).
Approach: The system consisted of a dose prediction network (DPN) and a plan-approval probability network (PPN). DPN predicts OAR D2cc and CTV D90% of the current fraction from the patient's current anatomy and prescription dose of HDRBT. PPN outputs the probability of a given plan being acceptable to the physician based on the patient’s anatomy and the total dose combining HDRBT and external beam radiotherapy sessions. Training of the networks was achieved by first training them separately for a good initialization, and then jointly via an adversarial process. We collected approved treatment plans of 248 treatment fractions from 63 patients. Among them, 216 plans from 54 patients were employed in a four-fold cross validation study, and the remaining 32 plans from other 9 patients were saved for independent testing.
Main results: DPN predicted equivalent dose of 2 Gy for bladder, rectum, sigmoid D2cc and CTV D90% with a relative error of 11.51±6.92%, 8.23±5.75%, 7.12±6.00%, and 10.16±10.42%, In a task that differentiates clinically approved plans and disapproved plans generated by perturbing doses in ground truth approved plans by 20%, PPN achieved accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve 0.70, 0.74, 0.65, and 0.74. 
Significance: We demonstrated the feasibility of developing a novel deep-learning framework that predicts a probability of plan approval for HDRBT of cervical cancer, which is an essential component in automatic treatment planning.

Human-like intelligent automatic treatment planning of head and neck cancer radiation therapy

“…Moreover, recognizing the limitations of quantitative metrics, integrating criteria such as physician judgment is necessary to ensure clinical acceptance of VTP-generated plans. One potential solution involves leveraging our recent development of a deep learning-based virtual physician (Gao et al 2022(Gao et al , 2024, which predicts plan approval probability using adversarial learning based on clinically approved plans. We plan to build the virtual physician model to the H&N context and integrate it into the DRL training in our future study.…”