Towards automated organs at risk and target volumes contouring: Defining precision radiation therapy in the modern era

Abstract

Precision radiotherapy is a critical and indispensable cancer treatment means in the modern clinical workflow with the goal of achieving “quality-up and cost-down” in patient care. The challenge of this therapy lies in developing computerized clinical-assistant solutions with precision, automation, and reproducibility built-in to deliver it at scale. In this work, we provide a comprehensive yet ongoing, incomplete survey of and discussions on the recent progress of utilizing advanced deep learning, semantic organ parsing, multimodal imaging fusion, neural architecture search and medical image analytical techniques to address four corner-stone problems or sub-problems required by all precision radiotherapy workflows, namely, organs at risk (OARs) segmentation, gross tumor volume (GTV) segmentation, metastasized lymph node (LN) detection, and clinical tumor volume (CTV) segmentation. Without loss of generality, we mainly focus on using esophageal and head-and-neck cancers as examples, but the methods can be extrapolated to other types of cancers. High-precision, automated and highly reproducible OAR/GTV/LN/CTV auto-delineation techniques have demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing the inter-practitioner variabilities and the time cost to permit rapid treatment planning and adaptive replanning for the benefit of patients. Through the presentation of the achievements and limitations of these techniques in this review, we hope to encourage more collective multidisciplinary precision radiotherapy workflows to transpire.