GPU-based ultra-fast direct aperture optimization for online adaptive radiation therapy

Abstract

Online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) has great promise to significantly 10 reduce normal tissue toxicity and/or improve tumor control through real-time treatment adaptations based on the current patient anatomy. However, the major technical obstacle for clinical realization of online ART, namely the inability to achieve real-time efficiency in treatment re-planning, has yet to be solved. To overcome this challenge, this paper presents our work on the implementation of 15 an intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) direct aperture optimization (DAO) algorithm on graphics processing unit (GPU) based on our previous work on CPU. We formulate the DAO problem as a large-scale convex programming problem, and use an exact method called column generation approach to deal with its extremely large dimensionality on GPU. Five 9-field 20 prostate and five 5-field head-and-neck IMRT clinical cases with 5×5 mm 2 beamlet size and 2.5×2.5×2.5 mm 3 voxel size were used to evaluate our algorithm on GPU. It takes only 0.7~2.5 seconds for our implementation to generate optimal treatment plans using 50 MLC apertures on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card. Our work has therefore solved a major problem in developing 25 ultra-fast (re-)planning technologies for online ART. C Men et al.2

A DVH-guided IMRT optimization algorithm for automatic treatment planning and adaptive radiotherapy replanning

“…Adaptive radiotherapy (ART) has been proposed to ease this issue by imaging the patient's changed geometry during the treatment course and modifying the original, or reference, plan accordingly. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] The new plan in either automatic treatment planning or ART replanning is supposed to inherit some clinically meaningful characteristics from the reference one. In this paper, we would like to consider dose-volume information in the form of the DVH as the common characteristic between the new and the reference plans.…”

A fast three‐dimensional gamma evaluation using a GPU utilizing texture memory for on‐the‐fly interpolations

“…The GPU is a powerful, massively parallel programmable architecture, 7 which can be used to decrease the calculation time for many applications. In radiotherapy, the GPU has already been used in a wide range of applications (e.g., ray-tracing, dose calculation, and CT reconstruction techniques) [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] reporting speed-up ratios from 6 to 908.…”

Online Adaptive Radiation Therapy

“…based accelerations for re-planning are also possible using GPU-based optimization. A study by Men et al demonstrated how a graphics processing unit can reoptimize apertures taking only 0.7-2.5 s for prostate and head-and-neck plans 54. A commercially available knowledge based planning tool from Varian (RapidPlan) may also reduce planning times by relying upon an "atlas" of institutionally-approved plans to establish a baseline plan quality for an adapted plan-of-the-day.…”