Multibeam tomotherapy: a new treatment unit devised for multileaf collimation, intensity-modulated radiation therapy

Feasibility of non-coplanar tomotherapy for lung cancer stereotactic body radiation therapy

To quantify the dosimetric gains from non-coplanar helical tomotherapy (HT) arcs for stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) of lung cancer, we created oblique helical arcs by rotating patient's CT images. Ten, 20 and 30 degrees of yaws were introduced in the treatment planning for a patient with a hypothetical lung tumor at the upper, middle and lower portion of the right lung, and the upper and middle left lung. The planning target volume (PTV) was 43 cm(3). 60 Gy was prescribed to the PTV. Dose to organs at risk (OARs), which included the lungs, heart, spinal cord and chest wall, was optimized using a 2.5 cm jaw, 0.287 pitch and modulation factor of 2.5. Composite plans were generated by dose summation of the resultant plans. These plans were evaluated for its conformity index (R(x)) and percentile volume of lung receiving radiation dose of x Gy (V(x)). Conformity index was defined by the ratio of x percent isodose volume and PTV. The results show that combination of non-coplanar arcs reduced R(50) by 4.5%, R(20) by 26% and R(10) by 30% on average. Non-coplanar arcs did not affect V(20) but reduced V(10) and V(5) by 10% and 24% respectively. Composite of the non-coplanar arcs also reduced maximum dose to the spinal cord by 20-39%. Volume of chest wall receiving higher than 30 Gy was reduced by 48% on average. Heart dose reduction was dependent on the location of the PTV and the choice of non-coplanar orientations. Therefore we conclude that non-coplanar HT arcs significantly improve critical organ sparing in lung SBRT without changing the PTV dose coverage.

Inverse planning for IMRT with nonuniform beam profiles using total-variation regularization (TVR)

PURPOSE

Radiation therapy with high dose rate and flattening filter-free (FFF) beams has the potential advantage of greatly reduced treatment time and out-of-field dose. Current inverse planning algorithms are, however, not customized for beams with nonuniform incident profiles and the resultant IMRT plans are often inefficient in delivery. The authors propose a total-variation regularization (TVR)-based formalism by taking the inherent shapes of incident beam profiles into account.

METHODS

A novel TVR-based inverse planning formalism is established for IMRT with nonuniform beam profiles. The authors introduce a TVR term into the objective function, which encourages piecewise constant fluence in the nonuniform FFF fluence domain. The proposed algorithm is applied to lung and prostate and head and neck cases and its performance is evaluated by comparing the resulting plans to those obtained using a conventional beamlet-based optimization (BBO).

RESULTS

For the prostate case, the authors' algorithm produces acceptable dose distributions with only 21 segments, while the conventional BBO requires 114 segments. For the lung case and the head and neck case, the proposed method generates similar coverage of target volume and sparing of the organs-at-risk as compared to BBO, but with a markedly reduced segment number.

CONCLUSIONS

TVR-based optimization in nonflat beam domain provides an effective way to maximally leverage the technical capacity of radiation therapy with FFF fields. The technique can generate effective IMRT plans with improved dose delivery efficiency without significant deterioration of the dose distribution.