Nanodosimetric quantity-weighted dose optimization for carbon-ion treatment planning

• Published in: Physical and engineering sciences in medicine 2024-06, Vol.47 (2), p.703-715
• Main Authors: Yang, Jingfen, Liu, Xinguo, Zhang, Hui, Dai, Zhongying, He, Pengbo, Ma, Yuanyuan, Shen, Guosheng, Chen, Weiqiang, Li, Qiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and Medical Physics; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering; Biomedicine; Biophysics; Medical and Radiation Physics; Scientific Paper
• ISSN: 2662-4729; 2662-4737
• DOI: 10.1007/s13246-024-01399-9

Dose verification of treatment plans is an essential step in radiotherapy workflows. In this work, we propose a novel method of treatment planning based on nanodosimetric quantity-weighted dose (NQWD), which could realize biological representation using pure physical quantities for biological-oriented carbon ion-beam treatment plans and their direct verification. The relationship between nanodosimetric quantities and relative biological effectiveness (RBE) was studied with the linear least-squares method for carbon-ion radiation fields. Next, under the framework of the matRad treatment planning platform, NQWD was optimized using the existing RBE-weighted dose (RWD) optimization algorithm. The schemes of NQWD-based treatment planning were compared with the RWD treatment plans in term of the microdosimetric kinetic model (MKM). The results showed that the nanodosimetric quantity F 3 − 10 had a good correlation with the radiobiological effect reflected by the relationship between RBE and F 3 − 10 . Moreover, the NQWD-based treatment plans reproduced the RWD plans generally. Therefore, F 3 − 10 could be adopted as a radiation quality descriptor for carbon-ion treatment planning. The novel method proposed herein not only might be helpful for rapid physical verification of biological-oriented ion-beam treatment plans with the development of experimental nanodosimetry, but also makes the direct comparison of ion-beam treatment plans in different institutions possible. Thus, our proposed method might be potentially developed to be a new strategy for carbon-ion treatment planning and improve patient safety for carbon-ion radiotherapy.