Abstract
Purpose: The choice of treatment plan in external beam radiotherapy relies mainly on the personal experience of specialists. The corresponding evaluation processes are highly subjective and prone to inaccuracies. This is why the development of user‐friendly, computer‐assisted decision tools would be quite useful for clinical purposes. Methods: We propose here one such tool, which makes use of data extracted from dose volume histograms DVH (differential and accumulative) of several treatment plans obtained from commercial planners. By means of it we can compare treatment plans taking into account the dose covering of the planning target volume (PTV), organs at risk (OAR) and healthy tissue (HT), as well as the conformity and homogeneity indexes. A weighted cost function is proposed to assess the global relevance of these terms. Several test cases taken from previous clinical treatments have been studied. In any of them a plan is selected out of a number of choices. These were obtained by varying the number, intensity and angles of beams in treatments with IMRT and 3D conformal techniques. Results: We have found a new figure of merit that permits to compare different treatment plans on a quantitative basis. Conclusions: We have obtained a good agreement between choices made according to this figures of merit and actually selected treatments plans.
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