Optimal timing of organs-at-risk-sparing adaptive radiation therapy for head-and-neck cancer under re-planning resource constraints.

ABSTRACT:

Background and purpose

Prior work on adaptive organ-at-risk (OAR)-sparing radiation therapy has typically reported outcomes based on fixed-number or fixed-interval re-planning, which represent one-size-fits-all approaches and do not account for the variable progression of individual patients' toxicities. The purpose of this study was to determine the personalized optimal timing of re-planning in adaptive OAR-sparing radiation therapy, considering limited re-planning resources, for patients with head and neck cancer (HNC).

Materials and methods

A novel Markov decision process (MDP) model was developed to determine optimal timing of re-planning based on the patient's expected toxicity, characterized by normal tissue complication probability (NTCP), for four toxicities. The MDP

SUBMITTER: Nosrat F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11926540 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature