Efficacy of fiducial marker-based image-guided radiation therapy in prostate tomotherapy and potential dose coverage improvement using a patient positioning optimization method

Abstract

To evaluate the dose coverage efficacy of fiducial marker-based prostate tomotherapy and a positioning correction optimization technique for the improvement of suboptimal dose distributions. Three gold fiducial markers were implanted in prostate glands for patients who were to receive prostate tomotherapy. TomoTherapy megavoltage computed tomographies (MVCTs; TomoTherapy, Madison, WI) were routinely acquired at treatment and were registered to corresponding planning CTs based on the markers to correct for interfractional positioning deviations using translational table movements. The prostate glands and seminal vesicles were delineated on the MVCTs acquired for 10 patients at different treatment fractions and the treatment dose coverage was computed with the marker-based correction taken into account. The treatment dose coverage was compared with the corresponding plan to evaluate the efficacy of the marker-based image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) approach. Separately, a hill-climbing optimization algorithm was used to optimize the positioning by maximizing a dose-based objective function. During the optimization, the dose was constantly recomputed with the translational correction until an optimized dose coverage was reached. This optimized dose coverage was compared with the marker-based dose coverage to evaluate dosimetric improvement for treatments in which suboptimal dose distributions were observed after the marker-based corrections. Suboptimal dose coverage of prostate glands and seminal vesicles were observed in about 8 and 6 of a total 75 fractions, respectively, after the marker-based IGRT positioning corrections. Six of the 10 patients experienced 1 or more factions of suboptimal prostate gland coverage and 2 of the 10 patients experienced 1 or more fractions of suboptimal seminal vesicle dose coverage. Utilization of the proposed positioning correction optimization method led to satisfactory dose coverage of both prostate glands and seminal vesicles for all 10 patients. Given the planning target volume margin size specified in the current study, the fiducial marker-based IGRT approach may not be completely adequate to achieve desired dose coverage of the target volumes at every fraction. Due to relatively poor image quality of MVCTs, additional investigations may be required to confirm the finding. The proposed positioning correction optimization method is shown to effectively improve the observed suboptimal dose coverage of the target volumes.