Report on AI-Infused Contouring Workflows for Adaptive Proton Therapy in the Head and Neck

TL;DR

This paper presents a rapid, AI-infused contouring workflow for adaptive proton therapy in head and neck cancer, reducing time and resource demands for quality assessment and enabling timely detection of anatomical changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, efficient workflow that leverages AI uncertainty and targeted inspection to streamline contour quality assessment in adaptive proton therapy.

Findings

Workflow reduces QA time significantly

Clinicians validated the effectiveness of AI-guided inspection

The approach supports clinical integration and resource optimization

Abstract

Delineation of tumors and organs-at-risk permits detecting and correcting changes in the patients' anatomy throughout the treatment, making it a core step of adaptive proton therapy (APT). Although AI-based auto-contouring technologies have sped up this process, the time needed to perform the quality assessment (QA) of the generated contours remains a bottleneck, taking clinicians between several minutes up to an hour to complete. This paper introduces a fast contouring workflow suitable for time-critical APT, enabling detection of anatomical changes in shorter time frames and with a lower demand of clinical resources. The proposed AI-infused workflow follows two principles uncovered after reviewing the APT literature and conducting several interviews and an observational study in two radiotherapy centers in the Netherlands. First, enable targeted inspection of the generated contours by leveraging AI uncertainty and clinically-relevant features such as the proximity of the organs-at-risk to the tumor. Second, minimize the number of interactions needed to edit faulty delineations with redundancy-aware editing tools that provide the user a sense of predictability and control. We use a proof of concept that we validated with clinicians to demonstrate how current and upcoming AI capabilities support the workflow and how it would fit into clinical practice.