Fast and robust adaptation of organs-at-risk delineations from planning scans to match daily anatomy in pre-treatment scans for online-adaptive radiotherapy of abdominal tumors.

Abstract

To validate a novel deformable image registration (DIR) method for online adaptation of planning organ-at-risk (OAR) delineations to match daily anatomy during hypo-fractionated RT of abdominal tumors. For 20 liver cancer patients, planning OAR delineations were adapted to daily anatomy using the DIR on corresponding repeat CTs. The DIR's accuracy was evaluated for the entire cohort by comparing adapted and expert-drawn OAR delineations using geometric (Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Modified Hausdorff Distance (MHD) and Mean Surface Error (MSE)) and dosimetric (D_max and D_mean) measures. For all OARs, DIR achieved average DSC, MHD and MSE of 86%, 2.1 mm, and 1.7 mm, respectively, within 20 s for each repeat CT. Compared to the baseline (translations), the average improvements ranged from 2% (in heart) to 24% (in spinal cord) in DSC, and 25% (in heart) to 44% (in right kidney) in MHD and MSE. Furthermore, differences in dose statistics (D_max, D_mean and D_2%) using delineations from an expert and the proposed DIR were found to be statistically insignificant (p > 0.01). The validated DIR showed potential for online-adaptive radiotherapy of abdominal tumors as it achieved considerably high geometric and dosimetric correspondences with the expert-drawn OAR delineations, albeit in a fraction of time required by experts.