Evaluation of Clinical Practicability of a Hybrid Automated Treatment Planning for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Objective Automatic planning is a commonly used alternative to manual planning. The study evaluated the clinical performance of automated plans available in commercially available treatment planning systems for NPC treatment by comparing hybrid automated plans with manual plans.

Methods A total of 14 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma were enrolled in the study. Each patient used 3 different sets of clinical goals to generate 3 automatic plans based on 3D dose prediction and 3 automatic plans based on dose drop prediction, respectively, compared with the manual plan used in clinic.

Results The performance of the automatic plan on PTV was comparable to that of the manual plan. Automatic planning based on 3D dose prediction can achieve the level of manual planning in most organs at risk, but automatic planning based on dose drop prediction can not perform well in some organs at risk, especially the parotid gland.

Conclusion The hybrid automatic schedule based on 3D dose prediction can reach the level of manual schedule, and has good robustness with the change of clinical objective.