Automatic reconstruction of the delivered dose of the day using MR-linac treatment log files and online MR imaging

Abstract

Background and purpose: Anatomical changes during external beam radiotherapy prevent the accurate delivery of the intended dose distribution. Resolving the delivered dose, which is currently unknown, is crucial to link radiotherapy doses to clinical outcomes and ultimately improve the standard of care.
Material and methods: In this study, we present a dose reconstruction workflow based on data routinely acquired during MR-guided radiotherapy. It employs 3D MR images, 2D cine MR images and treatment machine log files to calculate the delivered dose taking intrafractional motion into account. The developed pipeline was used to measure anatomical changes and assess their dosimetric impact in 89 prostate radiotherapy fractions delivered with a 1.5 T MR-linac at our institute.
Results: Over the course of radiation delivery, the CTV shifted 0.6 mm ± 2.1 mm posteriorly and 1.3 mm ± 1.5 mm inferiorly. When extrapolating the dose changes in each case to 20 fractions, the mean clinical target volume and clinical target volume dose-volume metrics decreased by 1.1 Gy ± 1.6 Gy and 0.1 Gy ± 0.2 Gy, respectively. Bladder did not change (0.0 Gy ± 1.2 Gy), while rectum decreased by 1.0 Gy ± 2.0 Gy. Although anatomical changes and their dosimetric impact were small in the majority of cases, large intrafractional motion caused the delivered dose to substantially deviate from the intended plan in some fractions.
Conclusions: The presented end-to-end workflow is able to reliably, non-invasively and automatically reconstruct the delivered prostate radiotherapy dose by processing MR-linac treatment log files and online MR images. In the future, we envision this workflow to be adapted to other cancer sites and ultimately to enter widespread clinical use.