Interplay-robust optimization for treating irregularly breathing lung patients with pencil beam scanning

TL;DR

This study introduces and evaluates interplay-robust optimization (IPRO) for lung cancer radiotherapy, demonstrating its ability to improve target coverage and reduce organ-at-risk doses under complex breathing motion uncertainties.

Contribution

It extends IPRO to account for amplitude variations in breathing, showing improved robustness over existing 4D-robust optimization methods in lung cancer treatment.

Findings

IPRO improves target coverage compared to 4DRO.

IPRO reduces organ-at-risk doses by an average of 4.2%.

Limited scenario IPRO-1C still achieves dose reductions with fewer scenarios.

Abstract

The steep dose gradients obtained with pencil beam scanning allow for precise tumor targeting at the cost of high sensitivity to uncertainties. Robust optimization is commonly applied to mitigate uncertainties in density and patient setup, while its application to motion management, called 4D-robust optimization (4DRO), is typically accompanied by other motion mitigation techniques. In particular, current commercial implementations of 4DRO do not model the interplay effect between the delivery time structure and the patient's motion. Previously, it has been shown that Interplay-robust optimization (IPRO) can mitigate the interplay effect given uncertainty in the patient's breathing frequency. In this study, we investigate and evaluate IPRO in the context where the motion uncertainty is extended to also include variations in breathing amplitude. We model the patients' motion using synthetic 4DCTs, each created by deforming a reference CT based on a motion pattern obtained with 4DMRI. Each synthetic 4DCT contains multiple breathing cycles, partitioned into two sets for scenario generation: one for optimization and one for evaluation. Motion scenarios are then created by randomly concatenating breathing cycles varying in period and amplitude. In addition, a method considering a single breathing cycle for generating optimization scenarios (IPRO-1C) is developed to investigate to which extent robustness can be achieved with limited information. IPRO and IPRO-1C increased the target coverage for all patient cases in terms of the near-worst-case (5th percentile) CTV D98, compared to 4DRO. After normalization of plan doses to equal target coverage, IPRO with 49 scenarios resulted in the greatest decreases in OAR dose, with near-worst-case (95th percentile) improvements averaging 4.2 %. IPRO-1C with 9 scenarios, with comparable computational demands as 4DRO, decreased OAR dose by 1.7 %.