Towards faster plan adaptation for proton arc therapy using initial treatment plan information

Background and Purpose

Proton arc therapy (PAT) is an emerging modality delivering continuously rotating proton beams. Current PAT planning approaches are time-consuming, making them unsuitable for online adaptation. This study proposes an accelerated workflow for adapting PAT plans.

Materials and Methods

The proposed workflow transfers spots from initial computed tomography (CT) to the CT of the day, updates energy layers considering the initial pattern, and re-optimizes selected transferred spots based on their initial weights and impact on the objective function.

A retrospective study was conducted on five head and neck patients who underwent plan adaptation on a repeated CT. PAT plans were generated with two different methods on the repeated CT: reference, created de novo, and smart-adapted, generated with the proposed adaptive workflow. Robust optimization was performed for all plans.

Results

Smart-adapted plans achieved similar mean dose to organs at risk as the reference: the largest median increase of mean dose was 1.9 Gy to the mandible; the median of maximum dose to spinal cord was 0.5 Gy lower for the smart-adapted plans. The median target coverage, i.e. D₉₈, to primary tumor and nodes of smart-adapted plans decreased by 0.2 and 0.4 Gy for the nominal case, and 0.4 and 0.6 Gy for the worst-case scenario; all smart-adapted plans met clinical objectives. The smart-adaptation method reduced average planning time from 19184 s to 5626 s, a 3.4-fold improvement.

Conclusions

Smart-adapted plans achieve similar plan quality to the reference method, while significantly reducing plan generation time for new patient anatomy.