First application of a pixel-wise analysis on bladder dose–surface maps in prostate cancer radiotherapy

Modeling Urinary Dysfunction After External Beam Radiation Therapy of the Prostate Using Bladder Dose-Surface Maps: Evidence of Spatially Variable Response of the Bladder Surface

“…For hollow organs, the maps are a two-dimensional representation of the dose planned to the organ surface, allowing dose-symptom associations in specific anatomical regions to be explicitly assessed. In the domain of urinary symptoms, the use of dose-surface maps has only recently received further attention [6].…”

“…A number of studies have investigated the relationships between localised anatomical structures of the bladder and symptoms of urinary dysfunction [6,9,10]. Heemsbergen et al studied the spatial dose distribution focusing on the approximate location of the bladder trigone and urinary obstruction [9].…”

“…Ghadjar et al delineated the distal ends of both ureters to produce dose-volume histograms of the trigone and studied the associations to patientreported International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) [10]. Palorini et al analysed the acute symptoms using dose-surface maps [6]. The studies, however, either reduced the comparisons to a single point, probably to avoid multiple-comparison problems [9], re-contoured an especially difficult structure [10], analysed a small number of patients [6] and/or were limited to generalised or acute urinary symptoms [6,10].…”

Understanding Urinary Toxicity after Radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer: First Steps Forward

“…Some studies from the literature underlined the need to overcome the assumption that the urinary bladder is uniformly sensitive to radiation (26,27,31,35,36,73). As a matter of fact, the bladder comprises several substructures which may have distinct radiobiological behaviors and sensitivities, leading to different impacts on distinct urinary symptoms (see Fig.…”

Texture analysis of T1‐w and T2‐w MR images allows a quantitative evaluation of radiation‐induced changes of internal obturator muscles after radiotherapy for prostate cancer

“…8,9 Recently, new methods based on a pixel-wise analysis of bladder dose-surface maps have been suggested to overcome the limits of DVH/DSH-based models and with the purpose of identifying the bladder substructures associated with urinary toxicity. 10,11 Other anatomical structures, however, such as the pelvic floor muscles, were disregarded even if they can play an important role especially in the continence function. [12][13][14] Mp-MRI could have a compelling role in this context, due to its potentiality to fully characterize the soft tissues from different points of view, such as their anatomical, structural, and functional properties described by the information carried out by different acquisition techniques.…”