Automatic Generation of Planning Volumes in Radiotherapy Using the Eclipse Scripting Application Programming Interface (ESAPI)
A Ruiz*, M Almada, C Pfaff, F Munoz, C Venencia, Instituto Zunino - Fundacion Marie Curie, Cordoba, ARGENTINA
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PO-GePV-T-296 (Sunday, 7/10/2022) [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]
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Purpose: The automation of processes in the radiotherapy workflow is a powerful tool that has increased markedly in recent years. The aim of this work is to automate the planning volume generation process and to evaluate its application in Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) treatments, given that these in particular present great variability of volumes and dose levels
Methods: To automate volume generation, ESAPI with C# programming language was used. Eclipse commands were accessed to perform expand, cut, join, and structure creation operations. A graphical interface was designed for physics specialists to enter dose levels for each volume. For manual volume generation, each structure is created and Boolean operations are performed in Eclipse. Ten patients with HNC were evaluated, and the volumes and nomenclatures of the structures created manually and automatically were compared. In addition, the time invested by the professionals to generate the structures with the two modalities was quantified
Results: The developed software automatically generates planning target volumes with the determined dose levels, organ volumes at risk, and the total planning volume. The variation between manually and automatically created volumes is less than 3.2%, which is observed at the edges of the contours. The average time required to generate the structures manually is 11:36 minutes and automatically it is 1:26 minutes, being only 10% of the manual way. In the automatic generation, the consistency of the nomenclature is maintained
Conclusion: Automating the process of generating planning volumes simplifies steps, reduces random errors, greatly diminishes the time invested in this stage, and improves efficiency in the formulation of radiotherapy plans. Moreover, it allows the establishment of standardized nomenclatures and such conformity improves the safety of the plans.
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