Evaluation and comparison of RT plans
iTA Plan
PROJECT FOR THE EVALUATION AND COMPARISON OF RT PLANS
PROJECT FOR THE EVALUATION AND COMPARISON OF RT PLANS
The project iTA Plan (Innovative Tools for Advanced analysis of radiotherapy treatment PLANs) aimed at developing tools and algorithms for the evaluation and comparison of RT treatment plans.
First, we developed an accurate method for DVH calculation. As RT Plan evaluation and comparison are based on the analysis of dose distributions and DVHs, we developed an accurate method for the DVH calculation. A fine tuning of parameters was performed to minimize the distances between the DVHs calculated by iTA Plan and the DVHs exported by different TPS.
Then we implemented a method described in literature [B. E. Nelms et al., Practical Radiation Oncology (2012) 2, 296-305], the Plan Quality Metrics (PQM), to use as reference for the evaluation of RT Plans.
PQM is a sophisticated scoring mechanism that removes any ambiguity of the plan objectives and provides a fair platform to compare plan results.
Afterwards we developed a new method for the evaluation and comparison of dose distributions. Starting from a list of objectives and constraints, the method extends the evaluation domain of each metric to the whole dose/volume space. The similarity between a specific DVH and an ideal (or a reference) DVH is evaluated.
The overall evaluation function expresses the distance of a treatment plan with respect to the ideal (or a reference) treatment plan. This method allows to describe also small differences between two dose distributions both respecting each discrete constraint.
The developed algorithms and tools were implemented in iTA PACS.
The project was co-financed by FVG under POR FESR 2014-2020 programme.
