Authors (including presenting author) :
Cheung JSC(1), Ng SCY(1)
Affiliation :
(1) Department of Clinical Oncology, Queen Mary Hospital
Introduction :
Automated radiotherapy treatment planning is the trend for busy radiotherapy centres throughout the world nowadays. Major treatment planning systems (TPS), including Eclipse of Varian, Pinnacle of Philips, and RayStation of RaySearch Laboratories, offer the potentials of automated treatment planning functionalities through scripting or commercial packages such as knowledge-based planning and multicriteria optimization (MCO) approach. With the recent upgrade of our Eclipse TPS version to v15.6, automated treatment planning becomes possible with Eclipse scripting application programming interface (API).
Objectives :
The objectives of this work are to replace numerous tedious manual tasks in intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) planning for head-and-neck (H&N) cases with automation, to increase plan consistency, and to reduce treatment planning time and workload so as to spare time for more checking work of the treatment plans.
Methodology :
API scripting was performed on a non-clinical standalone Varian TPS workstation with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019. The script can be run as a binary plug-in in External Beam Planning of Eclipse v15.6.
Result & Outcome :
A graphical user interface (GUI) for H&N IMRT planning was designed, which aimed at requiring as few inputs from users as possible. The API script was tested with previous patients’ IMRT cases using the contoured structure sets and dose-volume objectives of previously approved plans, resulting in IMRT plans with comparable plan quality yet considerably less planning time. The API script can be successfully deployed for H&N IMRT treatment planning.
