Cardinality‐constrained plan‐quality and delivery‐time optimization method for proton therapy

作者：Bo-Wen Lin, Yuliang Li, Bin Liu, Shujun Fu, Yu-Ting Lin, Hao Gao · 发表于：Medical Physics · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1002/mp.17249 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Radiation Therapy and Dosimetry、Advanced Radiotherapy Techniques、Boron Compounds in Chemistry

BACKGROUND: While minimizing plan delivery time is beneficial for proton therapy in terms of motion management, patient comfort, and treatment throughput, it often poses a tradeoff with optimizing plan quality. A key component of plan delivery time is the energy switching time, which is approximately proportional to the number of energy layers, that is, the cardinality. PURPOSE: This work aims to develop a novel optimization method that can efficiently compute the pareto surface between plan quality and energy layer cardinality, for the planner to navigate through this quality-and-efficiency tradeoff and select the appropriate plan of a balanced tradeoff. METHODS: -norm regularization with an upper bound, and the upper bound is monotonically decreased to compute a series of treatment plans with gradually decreased energy layer cardinality on the quality-and-efficiency pareto surface. For any given treatment plan, the plan optimality is enforced using dose-volume planning objectives and the plan deliverability is imposed through minimum-monitor-unit (MMU) constraints, with optimization solution algorithm based on iterative convex relaxation. RESULTS: The new method CARD was validated in comparison with the benchmark plan of all energy layers (P0), and a state-of-the-art method called MMSEL, using prostate, head-and-neck (HN), lung, pancreas, liver and brain cases. While labor-intensive and time-consuming manual parameter tuning was needed for MMSEL to generate plans of predefi...