Artificial Intelligence-Facilitated Online Adaptive Proton Therapy Using Pencil Beam Scanning Proton Therapy

TL;DR

This study develops and validates an AI-enhanced online adaptive proton therapy workflow for prostate cancer, demonstrating improved plan quality, efficiency, and clinical robustness through retrospective analysis and quality assurance.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated AI-based auto-segmentation and re-optimization workflow for online adaptive proton therapy, showing clinical feasibility and improved treatment plans.

Findings

Re-optimization significantly improved plan quality after anatomical changes.

The workflow completed in approximately 9 minutes, demonstrating efficiency.

High accuracy confirmed by gamma analysis with over 98% passing rate.

Abstract

We propose an oAPT workflow that incorporates all these functionalities and validate its clinical implementation feasibility with prostate patients. AI-based auto-segmentation tool AccuContourTM (Manteia, Xiamen, China) was seamlessly integrated into oAPT. Initial spot arrangement tool on the vCT for re-optimization was implemented using raytracing. An LET-based biological effect evaluation tool was developed to assess the overlap region of high dose and high LET in selected OARs. Eleven prostate cancer patients were retrospectively selected to verify the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed oAPT workflow. The time cost of each component in the workflow was recorded for analysis. The verification plan showed significant degradation of the CTV coverage and rectum and bladder sparing due to the interfractional anatomical changes. Re-optimization on the vCT resulted in great improvement of the plan quality. No overlap regions of high dose and high LET distributions were observed in bladder or rectum in re-plans. 3D Gamma analyses in PSQA confirmed the accuracy of the re-plan doses before delivery (Gamma passing rate = 99.57%), and after delivery (98.59%). The robustness of the re-plans passed all clinical requirements. The average time for the complete execution of the workflow was 9.12minutes, excluding manual intervention time. The AI-facilitated oAPT workflow was demonstrated to be both efficient and effective by generating a re-plan that significantly improved the plan quality in prostate cancer treated with PBSPT.