Fully automated volumetric modulated arc therapy plan generation for prostate cancer patients.

Purpose: To develop and evaluate fully automated volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) treatment planning for prostate cancer patients, avoiding manual trial-and-error tweaking of plan parameters by dosimetrists.

Methods And Materials: A system was developed for fully automated generation of VMAT plans with our commercial clinical treatment planning system (TPS), linked to the in-house developed Erasmus-iCycle multicriterial optimizer for preoptimization. For 30 randomly selected patients, automatically generated VMAT plans (VMATauto) were compared with VMAT plans generated manually by 1 expert dosimetrist in the absence of time pressure (VMATman). For all treatment plans, planning target volume (PTV) coverage and sparing of organs-at-risk were quantified.

Results: All generated plans were clinically acceptable and had similar PTV coverage (V95% > 99%). For VMATauto and VMATman plans, the organ-at-risk sparing was similar as well, although only the former plans were generated without any planning workload.

Conclusions: Fully automated generation of high-quality VMAT plans for prostate cancer patients is feasible and has recently been implemented in our clinic.