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. 2022 Mar;6(3):288-293.
doi: 10.1109/trpms.2021.3092296. Epub 2021 Jun 25.

Fixed Beamline Optimization for Intensity Modulated Carbon-Ion Therapy

Pavitra Ramesh  1 , Hengjie Liu  1 , Wenbo Gu  2 , Ke Sheng  1
Affiliations

Fixed Beamline Optimization for Intensity Modulated Carbon-Ion Therapy

Pavitra Ramesh et al. IEEE Trans Radiat Plasma Med Sci. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

A major obstacle for the adoption of heavy ion therapy is the cost and technical difficulties to construct and maintain a rotational gantry. Many heavy ion treatment facilities instead choose to construct fixed beamlines as a compromise, which we propose to mitigate with optimized treatment couch angle. We formulate the integrated beam orientation and scanning spot optimization problem as a quadratic cost function with a group sparsity regularization term. The optimization problem is efficiently solved using fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA). To test the method, we created the fixed beamline plans with couch rotation (FBCR) and without couch rotation (FB) for intensity modulated carbon-ion therapy (IMCT) and compared with the ideal scenario where both the couch and gantry have 360 degrees of freedom (GCR). FB, FBCR, and GCR IMCT plans were compared for ten pancreas cases. The FBCR plans show comparable PTV coverage and OAR doses for each pancreas case. In conclusion, the dosimetric limitation of fixed beams in heavy ion radiotherapy may be largely mitigated with integrated beam orientation optimization of the couch rotation.

Keywords: beam orientation; carbon ion; gantry; heavy ion; optimization.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Candidate beams for GCR (blue), FBCR (red), and FB (green). The gantry-based plan includes 420 non-coplanar beams. FBCR includes 60 couch angles from the 45° and 30 from the 90° polar angles, and the FB plan includes one 45° and one 90° gantry angle, both with couch at 0°.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Beam orientation along with isodose comparison between GCR (top), FBCR (middle), and FB (bottom) plans for pancreas patient F.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Dose-volume histogram for pancreas patient F. Solid lines represent the GCR, dotted lines represent FBCR, and dashed lines represent FB.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
PTV statistics for all pancreatic cases. Dmax and Dmean are biological dose values represented as a percent of the prescribed dose to the PTV volume.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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