A deep learning based dynamic arc radiotherapy photon dose engine trained on Monte Carlo dose distributions

Background and purpose

Despite hardware acceleration, state-of-the-art Monte Carlo (MC) dose engines require considerable computation time to reduce stochastic noise. We developed a deep learning (DL) based dose engine reaching high accuracy at strongly reduced computation times.

Materials and methods

Radiotherapy treatment plans and computed tomography scans were collected for 350 treatments in a variety of tumor sites. Dose distributions were computed using a MC dose engine for $\sim$30,000 separate segments at 6 MV and 10 MV beam energies, both flattened and flattening filter free. For dynamic arcs these explicitly incorporated the leaf, jaw and gantry motions during dose delivery. A neural network was developed, combining two-dimensional convolution and recurrence using 64 hidden channels. Parameters were trained to minimize the mean squared log error loss between the MC computed dose and the model output. Full dose distributions were reconstructed for 100 additional treatment plans. Gamma analyses were performed to assess accuracy.

Results

DL dose evaluation was on average 82 times faster than MC computation at a 1 % accuracy setting. In voxels receiving at least 10 % of the maximum dose the overall global gamma pass rate using a 2 % and 2 mm criterion was 99.6 %, while mean local gamma values were accurate within 2 %. In the high dose region over 50 % of maximum the mean local gamma approached a 1 % accuracy.

Conclusions

A DL based dose engine was implemented, able to accurately reproduce MC computed dynamic arc radiotherapy dose distributions at high speed.