Large-scale dose evaluation of deep learning organ contours in head-and-neck radiotherapy by leveraging existing plans.

Background and purpose

Retrospective dose evaluation for organ-at-risk auto-contours has previously used small cohorts due to additional manual effort required for treatment planning on auto-contours. We aimed to do this at large scale, by a) proposing and assessing an automated plan optimization workflow that used existing clinical plan parameters and b) using it for head-and-neck auto-contour dose evaluation.

Materials and methods

Our automated workflow emulated our clinic's treatment planning protocol and reused existing clinical plan optimization parameters. This workflow recreated the original clinical plan (

Results

For plan recreation (

Conclusions

The plan replication capability of our automated program provides a blueprint for other clinics to perform auto-contour dose evaluation with large patient cohorts. Finally, despite geometric differences, auto-contours had a minimal median dose impact, hence inspiring confidence in their utility and facilitating their clinical adoption.

Informations de copyright

© 2024 The Author(s).

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.