Towards artificial intelligence-based automated treatment planning in clinical practice: A prospective study of the first clinical experiences in high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy.

Purpose: This prospective study evaluates our first clinical experiences with the novel ``BRachytherapy via artificial Intelligent GOMEA-Heuristic based Treatment planning'' (BRIGHT) applied to high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy.

Methods And Materials: Between March 2020 and October 2021, 14 prostate cancer patients were treated in our center with a 15Gy HDR-brachytherapy boost. BRIGHT was used for bi-objective treatment plan optimization and selection of the most desirable plans from a coverage-sparing trade-off curve.

Robust optimization for HDR prostate brachytherapy applied to organ reconstruction uncertainty.

Purpose: Recently, we introduced a bi-objective optimization approach based on dose-volume indices to automatically create clinically good HDR prostate brachytherapy plans. To calculate dose-volume indices, a reconstruction algorithm is used to determine the 3D organ shape from 2D contours, inevitably containing settings that influence the result. We augment the optimization approach to quickly find plans that are robust to differences in 3D reconstruction.

Bi-objective optimization of catheter positions for high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy.

Purpose: Bi-objective simultaneous optimization of catheter positions and dwell times for high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy, based directly on dose-volume indices, has shown promising results. However, optimization with the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm MO-RV-GOMEA so far required several hours of runtime, and resulting catheter positions were not always clinically feasible. The aim of this study is to extend the optimization model and apply GPU parallelization to achieve clinically acceptable computation times.

Sensitivity of dose-volume indices to computation settings in high-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy treatment plan evaluation.

Purpose: To investigate the variation in computed dose-volume (DV) indices for high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy that can result from typical differences in computation settings in treatment planning systems (TPSs).

Methods: Five factors were taken into account: number of dose-calculation points, radioactive source description, interpolation between delineated contours, intersections between delineated organ contours, and organ shape at the top and bottom contour using either full or partial slice thickness. Using in-house developed software, the DV indices of the treatment plans of 26 patients were calculated with different settings, and compared to a baseline setting that closely followed the default settings of the TPS used in our medical center.

A comparative study between outbred and inbred rat strains for the use in in vivo IPV potency testing.

In vivo potency testing of inactivated poliovirus vaccines (IPV) is generally performed in rats, although no systematic investigation has identified the most appropriate rat strain for anti-poliovirus antibody quantification. We investigated humoral immune responses to IPV in five different rat strains to identify the most suitable strain. Three outbred (Wistar, Wistar Hannover, Sprague-Dawley) and two inbred rat strains (Fisher 344, Wistar Furth) were immunized intramuscularly with a full or one-fifth human dose of commercial IPV.

The Th1 immune response to Plasmodium falciparum circumsporozoite protein is boosted by adenovirus vectors 35 and 26 with a homologous insert.

The most advanced malaria vaccine, RTS,S, is comprised of a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum circumsporozoite (CS) protein, fused to and admixed with the hepatitis B virus surface antigen, and an adjuvant [corrected].This vaccine confers short-term protection against malaria infection, with an efficacy of about 50%, and induces particularly B-cell and CD4(+) T-cell responses.In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that the Th1 immune response to CS protein,in particular the CD8(+) T-cell response, which is needed for strong and lasting malaria immunity, is boosted to sustainable levels by adenovirus vectors 35 and 26 with a homologous insert (Ad35.