SuPART: supervised projective adapted resonance theory for automatic quality assurance approval of radiotherapy treatment plans

Abstract

Abstract Radiotherapy is a common treatment modality for the treatment of cancer, where treatments must be carefully designed to deliver appropriate dose to targets while avoiding healthy organs. The comprehensive multi-disciplinary quality assurance (QA) process in radiotherapy is designed to ensure safe and effective treatment plans are delivered to patients. However, the plan QA process is expensive, often time-intensive, and requires review of large quantities of complex data, potentially leading to human error in QA assessment. We therefore develop an automated machine learning algorithm to identify ‘acceptable’ plans (plans that are similar to historically approved plans) and ‘unacceptable’ plans (plans that are dissimilar to historically approved plans). This algorithm is a supervised extension of projective adaptive resonance theory, called SuPART, that learns a set of distinctive features, and considers deviations from them indications of unacceptable plans. We test SuPART on breast and prostate radiotherapy datasets from our institution, and find that SuPART outperforms common classification algorithms in several measures of accuracy. When no falsely approved plans are allowed, SuPART can correctly auto-approve 34% of the acceptable breast and 32% of the acceptable prostate plans, and can also correctly reject 53% of the unacceptable breast and 56% of the unacceptable prostate plans. Thus, usage of SuPART to aid in QA could potentially yield significant time savings.