Single-arc dose painting for precision radiation therapy

Abstract

Provided herein are methods and systems for designing a radiation treatment for a subject using single arc dose painting. The methods and systems comprise an algorithm or a computer-readable product having the same, to plan the radiation treatment. The algorithm converts pairs of multiple leaf collimation (MLC) leaves to sets of leaf aperture sequences that form a shortest path single arc thereof where the pairs of MLC leaves each aligned to an intensity profile of densely-spaced radiation beams, and connects each single arc of leaf apertures to form a final treatment single arc. Also provided is a method for irradiating a tumor in a subject using single arc dose painting.

Description

FEDERAL FUNDING LEGEND[0001]This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. CCF-0515203 and by National Institutes of Health Grant No. CA117997. The U.S. Government has certain rights in this invention.CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0002]This U.S. national application claims benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. §120 of international application PCT / US2008 / 005028, filed Apr. 18, 2008 which claims benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e) of provisional application U.S. Ser. No. 61 / 913,175, filed Apr. 20, 2007, now abandoned.CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0003]This U.S. national application claims benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. § 120 of international application PCT / US2008 / 005028, filed Apr. 18, 2008 which claims benefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e) of provisional application U.S. Ser. No. 60 / 913,175, filed Apr. 20, 2007, now abandoned.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0004]1. Field of the Invention[0005]The present invention relates to the ...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, because the ionizing radiation that is administered is damaging to both healthy and malignant tissue, it is important to confine the effect of the irradiation to the target tissue, to the extent possible, while sparing the adjacent tissue by minimizing irradiation thereto.

Although the quality of IMRT treatment plans has steadily improved, the plans tend to be relatively complicated, which makes for a somewhat inefficient delivery of treatment.

Consequently, labor-intensiveness has been one of the drawbacks of IMRT.

Furthermore, in general, a large number of different complex field shapes is often needed, which also compromises the efficiency of the treatment and can result in an increased number of collimator artifacts (7).

Nevertheless, while long-term clinical results of IMRT treatments are still limited, initial results appear very promising, and with increased use of IMRT, more encouraging results are emerging.

However, IMAT has not been widely adopted for clinical use.

This limitation can significantly affect the quality of the treatment plans because the most preferred angle might be completely missed.

As a result, the final IMAT plan is almost always degraded from the unconstrained optimized plan.

Using such methods, it is prohibitive with today's technology to optimize the rotational delivery with more beam angles, because pencil beams must be calculated for all the beam angles (8-9).

For simple cases it was demonstrated that a single optimized arc can yield results as good as those of fixed-field IMRT, while, for more complicated cases, such as head and neck cases with multiple targets, such an approach would not work well, and intensity modulation is required (8).

Although allowing the planned dose rate to vary with gantry angle provides a new degree of freedom, such relaxation of a restraint is not sufficient in itself to establish that a single arc using the described optimization method can replace multiple-arc IMAT.

However, although the optimization starts with a limited number of fields and the connectedness of the field shapes can be ignored, as the optimization progresses, constraint to force the shape-connectedness will compromise the quality of he treatment plans.

More specifically, the prior art is deficient in methods and systems for single-arc dose radiation therapy.

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