Automatic catheter digitization in breast brachytherapy

Background

High dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy requires clinicians to digitize catheters manually. This process is time-consuming, complex, and depends heavily on clinical experience–especially in breast cancer cases, where catheters may be inserted at varying angles and orientations due to an irregular anatomy.

Purpose

This study is the first to automate catheter digitization specifically for breast HDR brachytherapy, emphasizing the unique challenges associated with this treatment site. It also introduces a pipeline that automatically digitizes catheters, generates dwell positions, and calculates the delivered dose for new breast cancer patients.

Methods

Treatment data from 117 breast cancer patients treated with HDR brachytherapy were used. Pseudo-contours for the catheters were created from the treatment digitization points and divided into three classes: catheter body, catheter head, and catheter tip. An nnU-Net pipeline was trained to segment the pseudo-contours on treatment planning computed tomography images of 88 patients (training and validation). Then, pseudo-contours were digitized by separating the catheters into connected components. Predicted catheters with an unusual volume were flagged for manual review. A custom algorithm was designed to report and separate connected components containing colliding catheters. Finally, a spline was fitted to every separated catheter, and the tip was identified on the spline using the tip contour prediction. Dwell positions were placed from the created tip at a regular step size extracted from the DICOM plan file. Distance from each dwell position used during the clinical treatment to the fitted spline (shaft distance) was computed, as well as the distance from the treatment tip to the one identified by our pipeline. Dwell times from the clinical plan were assigned to the nearest generated dwell positions. TG-43 dose in water was computed analytically, and the absorbed dose in the medium was predicted using a published AI-based dose prediction model. Dosimetric comparison between the clinically delivered plan dose and the created automated plan dose was evaluated regarding dosimetric indices percent error.

Results

Our pipeline was used to digitize 408 catheters on a test set of 29 patients. Shaft distance was on average $0.70\pm 3.91\text{mm}$ and distance to the tip was on average $1.37\pm 5.25\text{mm}$. The dosimetric error between the manual and automated treatment plans was, on average, below 3% for planning target volume $V_{100}$, $V_{150}$, $V_{200}$ and for the lung, heart, skin, and chest wall $D_{2cc}$ and $D_{1cc}$, in both water and heterogeneous media. For $D_{0.1cc}$ values in all the organs at risk, the average error remained below 5%. The pipeline execution time, including auto-contouring, digitization, and dose to medium prediction, averages 118 s, ranging from 63 to 294 s. The pipeline successfully flagged all cases where digitization was not performed correctly.

Conclusions

Our pipeline is the first to automate the digitization of catheters for breast brachytherapy, as well as the first to generate dwell positions and predict corresponding AI-based absorbed dose to medium based on automatically digitized catheters. The automatically digitized catheters are in excellent agreement with the manually digitized ones while more accurately reflecting their true anatomical shape.