Clinical Viability of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy for Personalized Radiation Treatment

Skwierawska, Dominika; López-Valverde, José Antonio; Balcerzyk, Marcin; Leal, Antonio

doi:10.20944/preprints202109.0453.v3

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…On the other hand, the acquisition of boron concentration distribution is one of the crucial phases in BNCT, as boron dose is the main component of BNCT dose composition. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has some advantages over other imaging modalities; for example, less invasiveness, more versatility with fewer restrictions of a boron–gadolinium compound, and can also provide functional and morphological information without using radiation, which is helpful for treatment planning 3–8 …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has some advantages over other imaging modalities; for example, less invasiveness, more versatility with fewer restrictions of a boron-gadolinium compound, and can also provide functional and morphological information without using radiation, which is helpful for treatment planning. [3][4][5][6][7][8] However, MRI does not provide direct information for dose calculation as CT imaging before BNCT therapy. Despite the significant physical differences between MRI and CT, the high entropy of MRI data indicates the existence of a surjective transformation from MRI to CT image.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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SARU: A self‐attention ResUNet to generate synthetic CT images for MR‐only BNCT treatment planning

et al. 2022

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Purpose Despite the significant physical differences between magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT), the high entropy of MRI data indicates the existence of a surjective transformation from MRI to CT image. However, there is no specific optimization of the network itself in previous MRI/CT translation works, resulting in mistakes in details such as the skull margin and cavity edge. These errors might have moderate effect on conventional radiotherapy, but for boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT), the skin dose will be a critical part of the dose composition. Thus, the purpose of this work is to create a self‐attention network that could directly transfer MRI to synthetical computerized tomography (sCT) images with lower inaccuracy at the skin edge and examine the viability of magnetic resonance (MR)‐guided BNCT. Methods A retrospective analysis was undertaken on 104 patients with brain malignancies who had both CT and MRI as part of their radiation treatment plan. The CT images were deformably registered to the MRI. In the U‐shaped generation network, we introduced spatial and channel attention modules, as well as a versatile “Attentional ResBlock,” which reduce the parameters while maintaining high performance. We employed five‐fold cross‐validation to test all patients, compared the proposed network to those used in earlier studies, and used Monte Carlo software to simulate the BNCT process for dosimetric evaluation in test set. Results Compared with UNet, Pix2Pix, and ResNet, the mean absolute error (MAE) of self‐attention ResUNet (SARU) is reduced by 12.91, 17.48, and 9.50 HU, respectively. The “two one‐sided tests” show no significant difference in dose‐volume histogram (DVH) results. And for all tested cases, the average 2%/2 mm gamma index of UNet, ResNet, Pix2Pix, and SARU were 0.96 ± 0.03, 0.96 ± 0.03, 0.95 ± 0.03, and 0.98 ± 0.01, respectively. The error of skin dose from SARU is much less than the results from other methods. Conclusions We have developed a residual U‐shape network with an attention mechanism to generate sCT images from MRI for BNCT treatment planning with lower MAE in six organs. There is no significant difference between the dose distribution calculated by sCT and real CT. This solution may greatly simplify the BNCT treatment planning process, lower the BNCT treatment dose, and minimize image feature mismatch.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SARU: A self‐attention ResUNet to generate synthetic CT images for MR‐only BNCT treatment planning

et al. 2022

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Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization-Based Chromosome Aberration Analysis Unveils the Mechanistic Basis for Boron-Neutron Capture Therapy’s Radiobiological Effectiveness

Elia,

Fede,

Bortolussi

et al. 2024

Applied Sciences

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Boron-Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) is a tumor-selective radiotherapy, based on the nuclear capture reaction 10B(n,α)7Li producing short range α-particles and recoiling 7Li nuclei exclusively confined to boron-enriched cancer cells. These particles possess high Linear Energy Transfer (LET) and mainly generate clustered DNA strand breaks, which are less faithfully restored by intracellular repair. Mis-rejoined breaks yield chromosome aberrations (CAs), which, for high-LET radiation, are more complex in nature than after sparsely ionizing photons/electrons used in conventional radiotherapy, which leads to increased cell-killing ability. However, such a radiobiological tenet of BNCT has been scantily studied at the DNA level. Therefore, the aim of this work was to evaluate CAs induced by BNCT in comparison to X-rays in genomically stable normal human epithelial mammary MCF10A cells. Two Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH)-based techniques were applied to calyculin A-induced prematurely condensed chromosomes: Whole Chromosome Painting and multicolor(m)-FISH. Not only did BNCT induce a greater CA frequency than X-ray irradiation, but m-FISH karyotype-wide analysis confirmed that CAs following BNCT exhibited a much higher degree of complexity compared to X-rays. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such evidence supporting the radiobiological superiority of BNCT has been shown.

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Development of a 2-(2-Hydroxyphenyl)-1H-benzimidazole-Based Fluorescence Sensor Targeting Boronic Acids for Versatile Application in Boron Neutron Capture Therapy

Kondo

Takada

Hagimori

et al. 2023

Cancers

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Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) is an attractive approach to treating cancers. Currently, only one 10B-labeled boronoagent (Borofalan, BPA) has been approved for clinical BNCT in Japan, and methods for predicting and measuring BNCT efficacy must be established to support the development of next-generation 10B-boronoagents. Fluorescence sensors targeting boronic acids can achieve this because the amount and localization of 10B in tumor tissues directly determine BNCT efficacy; however, current sensors are nonoptimal given their slow reaction rate and weak fluorescence (quantum yield < 0.1). Herein, we designed and synthesized a novel small molecular-weight fluorescence sensor, BITQ, targeting boronic acids. In vitro qualitative and quantitative properties of BITQ were assessed using a fluorophotometer and a fluorescence microscope together with BPA quantification in blood samples. BITQ exhibited significant quantitative and selective fluorescence after reacting with BPA (post-to-pre-fluorescence ratio = 5.6; quantum yield = 0.53); the fluorescence plateaued within 1 min after BPA mixing, enabling the visualization of intracellular BPA distribution. Furthermore, BITQ quantified the BPA concentration in mouse blood with reliability comparable with that of current methods. This study identifies BITQ as a versatile fluorescence sensor for analyzing boronic acid agents. BITQ will contribute to 10B-boronoagent development and promote research in BNCT.

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Clinical Viability of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy for Personalized Radiation Treatment

Cited by 9 publications

References 51 publications

SARU: A self‐attention ResUNet to generate synthetic CT images for MR‐only BNCT treatment planning

SARU: A self‐attention ResUNet to generate synthetic CT images for MR‐only BNCT treatment planning

Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization-Based Chromosome Aberration Analysis Unveils the Mechanistic Basis for Boron-Neutron Capture Therapy’s Radiobiological Effectiveness

Development of a 2-(2-Hydroxyphenyl)-1H-benzimidazole-Based Fluorescence Sensor Targeting Boronic Acids for Versatile Application in Boron Neutron Capture Therapy

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