Abstract
Purpose:We investigate the feasibility of choosing from a small set of standardized templates of beam bouquets (i.e., entire beam configuration settings) for lung IMRT planning to improve planning efficiency and quality consistency, and also to facilitate automated planning.Methods:A set of beam bouquet templates is determined by learning from the beam angle settings in 60 clinical lung IMRT plans. A k‐medoids cluster analysis method is used to classify the beam angle configuration into clusters. The value of the average silhouette width is used to determine the ideal number of clusters. The beam arrangements in each medoid of the resulting clusters are taken as the standardized beam bouquet for the cluster, with the corresponding case taken as the reference case. The resulting set of beam bouquet templates was used to re‐plan 20 cases randomly selected from the database and the dosimetric quality of the plans was evaluated against the corresponding clinical plans by a paired t‐test. The template for each test case was manually selected by a planner based on the match between the test and reference cases.Results:The dosimetric parameters (mean±S.D. in percentage of prescription dose) of the plans using 6 beam bouquet templates and those of the clinical plans, respectively, and the p‐values (in parenthesis) are: lung Dmean: 18.8±7.0, 19.2±7.0 (0.28), esophagus Dmean: 32.0±16.3, 34.4±17.9 (0.01), heart Dmean: 19.2±16.5, 19.4±16.6 (0.74), spinal cord D2%: 47.7±18.8, 52.0±20.3 (0.01), PTV dose homogeneity (D2%‐D99%): 17.1±15.4, 20.7±12.2 (0.03). The esophagus Dmean, cord D02 and PTV dose homogeneity are statistically better in the plans using the standardized templates, but the improvements (<5%) may not be clinically significant. The other dosimetric parameters are not statistically different.Conclusion:It's feasible to use a small number of standardized beam bouquet templates (e.g. 6) to generate plans with quality comparable to that of clinical plans.Partially supported by NIH/NCI under grant #R21CA161389 and a master research grant by Varian Medical System.
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