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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Radiation Oncology
Volume 15 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1382537
This article is part of the Research Topic Radiotherapy for Head and Neck Cancers View all 13 articles
Proof of concept of fully automated adaptive workflow for Head and Neck radiotherapy treatments with a conventional linear accelerator
Provisionally accepted
Gaia Muti
1*
Marco M J Felisi
1
Angelo F Monti
1
Chiara Carsana
1
Roberto Pellegrini
2
Edoardo Salmeri
2
Mauro Palazzi
1
Paola E Colombo
1- 1 Niguarda Ca' Granda Hospital, Milan, Italy
- 2 Elekta (Sweden), Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of an automatic workflow for head-and-neck (H&N) radiotherapy using a multi-atlas based auto-contouring software and an a-priori multicriteria plan optimisation algorithm and implement an adaptive online approach with CBCT images. Two different modalities are investigated, the fluence-to-position (FTP) and the adapt-to-shape (ATS) approach.Nine patients are used for the multi-atlas database. The organs at risk (OARs) of the H&N district and five additional structures (air, fat, tissue, bone and patient's exterior) subsequently used for the creation of the synthetic CT are auto-contoured with the Elekta ADMIRE ® software. The mCycle algorithm is used for the a-priori multicriteria plan calculation.A total of twenty H&N patients are selected for this step. The automatic plans are compared to manual VMAT plans by assessing differences in planning time, dose delivered to targets and OARs, and calculating the plan quality indexes (PQIs). Two patients are chosen for the retrospective CBCT adaptive online feasibility analysis. To assess the differences for the two adaptive modalities, the clinical goals for targets and OARs and the number of passed constraints are explored. An analysis of the timing for the different steps is carried out to assess its clinical applicability.The dice of the five HU layer structures range between 0.66 and 0.99. The mCycle autoplanning significantly reduces planning time, from 2 hours to 10 minutes. The radiotherapist deems all plans clinically acceptable, and in the majority of cases the automatic plan is the preference choice. The automatic plans enhance OARs sparing and preserve a good target coverage, this is also confirmed by the PQIs result. Comparing FTP and ATS modes in adaptive radiotherapy, ATS exhibits superior outcomes, mostly in the target coverage. In the FTP techniques target coverage is inadequate and statistically different from the accepted values. In the ATS the results align with the initial approved values. Using the ATS mode the planning time takes around 14 minutes and approximately 20 minutes for the entire treatment.
Keywords: Auto-planning, MCO, Online adaptive radiotherapy, Offline Adaptive radiotherapy, CBCT, Adapt to Shape, Fluence to Position
Received: 05 Feb 2024; Accepted: 03 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Muti, Felisi, Monti, Carsana, Pellegrini, Salmeri, Palazzi and Colombo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Gaia Muti, Niguarda Ca' Granda Hospital, Milan, Italy
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