Optimizing Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy: Advanced Machine Learning in Virtual Patient-Specific Plan Verification-Review Study

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Background: Virtual patient-specific plan verification in radiotherapy is critical to ensure precise dose delivery while minimizing healthy tissue exposure, particularly in prostate cancer treatments. Prior studies, however, have overlooked the physical implications of predictor features and lacked comprehensive decision support tools, leading to gaps in understanding and practical application. This research aims to bridge these gaps by providing a nuanced understanding of predictor features, exploring advanced automatic feature extraction methods, emphasizing model reliability, and proposing a comprehensive decision support tool. Our objective is to optimize radiotherapy protocols, ensuring safer and more effective treatments for patients undergoing prostate cancer therapy. Methods: This research employs a literature review approach. An extensive literature study served as the foundation. Results: Our study reveals that understanding the physical implications of predictor features significantly enhances prediction accuracy. Utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models for automatic feature extraction improves prediction performance, providing robust and transferable results. Conclusions: By emphasizing model reliability through the integration of treatment plan parameters, our approach ensures stable predictions across diverse patient cases. The proposed decision support tool offers clinicians detailed insights into predicted dose deliverability, facilitating informed decision-making for patient-specific treatment plans. Through these advancements, our research contributes to the optimization of radiotherapy protocols, ensuring safer and more effective treatments for patients undergoing prostate cancer therapy.