Affiliation:
1. School of Instrument Science and Optoelectronics Engineering Hefei University of Technology Hefei China
2. Department of Radiation Oncology The First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China Hefei China
3. School of Computer Science and Technology University of Science and Technology of China Hefei China
4. Department of Radiation Oncology Hubei Cancer Hospital, TongJi Medical College Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan China
5. Department of Radiation Oncology Rutgers‐Cancer Institute of New Jersey Rutgers‐Robert Wood Johnson Medical School New Brunswick New Jersey USA
Abstract
AbstractPurposeThis study aimed to develop a hybrid multi‐channel network to detect multileaf collimator (MLC) positional errors using dose difference (DD) maps and gamma maps generated from low‐resolution detectors in patient‐specific quality assurance (QA) for Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT).MethodsA total of 68 plans with 358 beams of IMRT were included in this study. The MLC leaf positions of all control points in the original IMRT plans were modified to simulate four types of errors: shift error, opening error, closing error, and random error. These modified plans were imported into the treatment planning system (TPS) to calculate the predicted dose, while the PTW seven29 phantom was utilized to obtain the measured dose distributions. Based on the measured and predicted dose, DD maps and gamma maps, both with and without errors, were generated, resulting in a dataset with 3222 samples. The network's performance was evaluated using various metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1‐score, ROC curves, and normalized confusion matrix. Besides, other baseline methods, such as single‐channel hybrid network, ResNet‐18, and Swin‐Transformer, were also evaluated as a comparison.ResultsThe experimental results showed that the multi‐channel hybrid network outperformed other methods, demonstrating higher average precision, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1‐scores, with values of 0.87, 0.89, 0.85, 0.97, and 0.85, respectively. The multi‐channel hybrid network also achieved higher AUC values in the random errors (0.964) and the error‐free (0.946) categories. Although the average accuracy of the multi‐channel hybrid network was only marginally better than that of ResNet‐18 and Swin Transformer, it significantly outperformed them regarding precision in the error‐free category.ConclusionThe proposed multi‐channel hybrid network exhibits a high level of accuracy in identifying MLC errors using low‐resolution detectors. The method offers an effective and reliable solution for promoting quality and safety of IMRT QA.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China