Deep learning driven predictive treatment planning for adaptive radiotherapy of lung cancer

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: To develop a novel deep learning algorithm of sequential analysis, Seq2Seq, for predicting weekly anatomical changes of lung tumor and esophagus during definitive radiotherapy, incorporate the potential tumor shrinkage into a predictive treatment planning paradigm, and improve the therapeutic ratio. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Seq2Seq starts with the primary tumor and esophagus observed on the planning CT to predict their geometric evolution during radiotherapy on a weekly basis, and subsequently updates the predictions with new snapshots acquired via weekly CBCTs. Seq2Seq is equipped with convolutional long short term memory to analyze the spatial-temporal changes of longitudinal images, trained and validated using a dataset including sixty patients. Predictive plans were optimized according to each weekly prediction and made ready for weekly deployment to mitigate the clinical burden of online weekly replanning. RESULTS: Seq2Seq tracks structural changes well: DICE between predicted and actual weekly tumor and esophagus were (0.83 ± 0.10, 0.79 ± 0.14, 0.78 ± 0.12, 0.77 ± 0.12, 0.75 ± 0.12, 0.71 ± 0.17), and (0.72 ± 0.16, 0.73 ± 0.11, 0.75 ± 0.08, 0.74 ± 0.09, 0.72 ± 0.14, 0.71 ± 0.14), respectively, while the average Hausdorff distances were within 2 mm. Evaluating dose to the actual weekly tumor and esophagus, a 4.2 Gy reduction in esophagus mean dose while maintaining 60 Gy tumor coverage was achieved with the predictive weekly plans, compared to the plan optimized using the initial tumor and esophagus alone, primarily due to noticeable tumor shrinkage during radiotherapy. CONCLUSION: It is feasible to predict the longitudinal changes of tumor and esophagus with the Seq2Seq, which could lead to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of lung adaptive radiotherapy.