An in-silico quality assurance study of contouring target volumes in thoracic tumors within a cooperative group setting

Abstract

Graphical abstract

ProCaLung – Peer review in stage III, mediastinal node-positive, non-small-cell lung cancer: How to benchmark clinical practice of nodal target volume definition and delineation in Belgium☆

“…In the PET-plan trial's dummy run, GTV volume and overlap metrics showed significant IOV before and after an additional teaching session [30]. The Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG), observed a median DSC for nodal GTV of only 0.35 as the target definition was highly uneven among participants [10].…”

“…A possible explanation for the persistence of IOV may be the lack of description of the anatomical differences between contours in many studies which mainly reported numerical expressions of IOV [6,9,10], instead of the information required for clinicians to adapt their methods. Furthermore, quantitative approaches used to analyze the quality of TVD [11] are generally applied to a reference 4 volume generated from multiple observers' inputs [12,13] irrespective of their similarity.…”