A treatment planning comparison of contemporary photon-based radiation techniques for breast cancer.

Background And Purpose: Adjuvant radiation therapy (RT) of the whole breast (WB) is still the standard treatment for early breast cancer. A variety of radiation techniques is currently available according to different delivery strategies. This study aims to provide a comparison of six treatment planning strategies commonly adopted for breast-conserving adjuvant RT and to use the Pareto concept in an attempt to assess the degree of plan optimization.

Analysis of the treatment plan evaluation process in radiotherapy through eye tracking.

Background And Purpose: Treatment plan evaluation is a clinical decision-making problem that involves visual search and analysis in a contextually rich environment, including delineated structures and isodose lines superposed on CT data. It is a two-step process that includes visual analysis and clinical reasoning. In this work, we used eye tracking methods to gain more knowledge about the treatment plan evaluation process in radiation therapy.

Discrepancies between selected Pareto optimal plans and final deliverable plans in radiotherapy multi-criteria optimization.

Multi-criteria optimization provides decision makers with a range of clinical choices through Pareto plans that can be explored during real time navigation and then converted into deliverable plans. Our study shows that dosimetric differences can arise between the two steps, which could compromise the clinical choices made during navigation.