Application programming in C# environment with recorded user software interactions and its application in autopilot of VMAT/IMRT treatment planning.

Henry Wang,Lei Xing

doi:10.1120/jacmp.v17i6.6425

Abstract

An autopilot scheme of volumetric‐modulated arc therapy (VMAT)/intensity‐modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) planning with the guidance of prior knowledge is established with recorded interactions between a planner and a commercial treatment planning system (TPS). Microsoft (MS) Visual Studio Coded UI is applied to record some common planner‐TPS interactions as subroutines. The TPS used in this study is a Windows‐based Eclipse system. The interactions of our application program with Eclipse TPS are realized through a series of subroutines obtained by prerecording the mouse clicks or keyboard strokes of a planner in operating the TPS. A strategy to autopilot Eclipse VMAT/IMRT plan selection process is developed as a specific example of the proposed “scripting” method. The autopiloted planning is navigated by a decision function constructed with a reference plan that has the same prescription and similar anatomy with the case at hand. The calculation proceeds by alternating between the Eclipse optimization and the outer‐loop optimization independent of the Eclipse. In the C# program, the dosimetric characteristics of a reference treatment plan are used to assess and modify the Eclipse planning parameters and to guide the search for a clinically sensible treatment plan. The approach is applied to plan a head and neck (HN) VMAT case and a prostate IMRT case. Our study demonstrated the feasibility of application programming method in C# environment with recorded interactions of planner‐TPS. The process mimics a planner's planning process and automatically provides clinically sensible treatment plans that would otherwise require a large amount of manual trial and error of a planner. The proposed technique enables us to harness a commercial TPS by application programming via the use of recorded human computer interactions and provides an effective tool to greatly facilitate the treatment planning process.PACS number(s): 87.55.D‐, 87.55.kd, 87.55.de

Highlights

190 Wang et al.: Autopilot of volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT)/IMRT treatment planning (IMRT) treatment plan — doing so is hindered by two major problems
There is a lack of means to “concatenate” the manual operations of the graphical user interface (GUI) of a commercial treatment planning system (TPS)
Some vendors provide application program interface (API) toolkit, which is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software, and this can be employed for certain applications.[1,2] But the availability and applicability of the API depend heavily on the vendor

Summary

Introduction

190 Wang et al.: Autopilot of VMAT/IMRT treatment planning (IMRT) treatment plan — doing so is hindered by two major problems. There is a lack of means to “concatenate” the manual operations of the graphical user interface (GUI) of a commercial treatment planning system (TPS). The need for interacting with the GUI of an application software or Web application is quite prevalent, and there are software tools developed for the Windows and UNIX/LINUX systems. Using these tools, for example, one can develop a test method to click a hyperlink in a Web application, type a value in a text box, or branch off and take different testing actions based on a value in a field. Coded UI Tests are useful where there is validation or other logic in the user interface, and are frequently used to automate an existing manual test

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