Winter is over: The use of Artificial Intelligence to individualise radiation therapy for breast cancer

Abstract

Artificial intelligence demonstrated its value for automated contouring of organs at risk and target volumes as well as for auto-planning of radiation dose distributions in terms of saving time, increasing consistency, and improving dose-volumes parameters. Future developments include incorporating dose/outcome data to optimise dose distributions with optimal coverage of the high-risk areas, while at the same time limiting doses to low-risk areas. An infinite gradient of volumes and doses to deliver spatially-adjusted radiation can be generated, allowing to avoid unnecessary radiation to organs at risk. Therefore, data about patient-, tumour-, and treatment-related factors have to be combined with dose distributions and outcome-containing databases.

Keywords

• Artificial intelligence
• Breast cancer
• Radiation therapy
• Neural network
• Deep learning
• Auto-segmentation