Imaging software developer Mirada Medical is highlighting a study to be presented at this week's American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) meeting in San Francisco.
The study explores the use of advanced registration methods to automatically identify patients who need replanning during adaptive radiotherapy (ART). The current process is time-consuming and presents a significant barrier to the adoption of ART techniques in the clinic, investigators from Groningen, the Netherlands, will report. Automated patient monitoring using advanced image registration can flag only those patients who need further investigation, saving significant time, Mirada said.
The study included 28 patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer. Target volumes and organs at risk were contoured on the planning CT and prepared for rescan using deformable image registration (Mirada RTx).
Next, dose distributions of the treatment plan were calculated on both images. Rather than making replanning decisions in the conventional manner by applying constraints to the recalculated dose on the rescan using warped structures, the investigators used the surrogate for recalculating a dose projection method using rigid transformation applied to the original dose and mapped onto the rescan. They applied identical restraints to the resulting dose to determine the need for replanning.
The automated dose projection method correctly removed 90% of cases from further evaluation while identifying 100% of those that required investigation, the researchers found.
