Artificial intelligence-based automated segmentation and radiotherapy dose mapping for thoracic normal tissues

Background and purpose

Objective assessment of delivered radiotherapy (RT) to thoracic organs requires fast and accurate deformable dose mapping. The aim of this study was to implement and evaluate an artificial intelligence (AI) deformable image registration (DIR) and organ segmentation-based AI dose mapping (AIDA) applied to the esophagus and the heart.

Materials and methods

AIDA metrics were calculated for 72 locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients treated with concurrent chemo-RT to 60 Gy in 2 Gy fractions in an automated pipeline. The pipeline steps were: (i) automated rigid alignment and cropping of planning CT to week 1 and week 2 cone-beam CT (CBCT) field-of-views, (ii) AI segmentation on CBCTs, and (iii) AI-DIR-based dose mapping to compute dose metrics. AIDA dose metrics were compared to the planned dose and manual contour dose mapping (manual DA).

Results

AIDA required ∼2 min/patient. Esophagus and heart segmentations were generated with a mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.80±0.15 and 0.94±0.05, a Hausdorff distance at 95th percentile (HD95) of 3.9±3.4 mm and 14.1±8.3 mm, respectively. AIDA heart dose was significantly lower than the planned heart dose (p = 0.04). Larger dose deviations (>=1Gy) were more frequently observed between AIDA and the planned dose (N = 26) than with manual DA (N = 6).

Conclusions

Rapid estimation of RT dose to thoracic tissues from CBCT is feasible with AIDA. AIDA-derived metrics and segmentations were similar to manual DA, thus motivating the use of AIDA for RT applications.