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Determining the Adequacy of Auto-Contouring Via Probabilistic Assessment of Ensuing Treatment Plan Metrics in Comparison with Manual Contours


H Nourzadeh

H Nourzadeh1*, W Watkins1 , J Siebers1 , M Ahmad1 , (1) University of Virginia Health Systems, Charlottesville, VA

Presentations

SU-C-BRB-5 (Sunday, July 31, 2016) 1:00 PM - 1:55 PM Room: Ballroom B


Purpose:
To determine if auto-contour and manual-contour—based plans differ when evaluated with respect to probabilistic coverage metrics and biological model endpoints for prostate IMRT.

Methods:
Manual and auto-contours were created for 149 CT image sets acquired from 16 unique prostate patients. A single physician manually contoured all images. Auto-contouring was completed utilizing Pinnacle’s Smart Probabilistic Image Contouring Engine (SPICE). For each CT, three different 78 Gy/39 fraction 7-beam IMRT plans are created; PD with drawn ROIs, PAS with auto-contoured ROIs, and PM with auto-contoured OARs with the manually drawn target. For each plan, 1000 virtual treatment simulations with different sampled systematic errors for each simulation and a different sampled random error for each fraction were performed using our in-house GPU-accelerated robustness analyzer tool which reports the statistical probability of achieving dose-volume metrics, NTCP, TCP, and the probability of achieving the optimization criteria for both auto-contoured (AS) and manually drawn (D) ROIs. Metrics are reported for all possible cross-evaluation pairs of ROI types (AS,D) and planning scenarios (PD,PAS,PM). Bhattacharyya coefficient (BC) is calculated to measure the PDF similarities for the dose-volume metric, NTCP, TCP, and objectives with respect to the manually drawn contour evaluated on base plan (D-PD).

Results:
We observe high BC values (BC≥0.94) for all OAR objectives. BC values of max dose objective on CTV also signify high resemblance (BC≥0.93) between the distributions. On the other hand, BC values for CTV’s D95 and Dmin objectives are small for AS-PM, AS-PD. NTCP distributions are similar across all evaluation pairs, while TCP distributions of AS-PM, AS-PD sustain variations up to %6 compared to other evaluated pairs.

Conclusion:
No significant probabilistic differences are observed in the metrics when auto-contoured OARs are used. The prostate auto-contour needs improvement to achieve clinically equivalent plans.




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