Artificial Intelligence-Based Organ Delineation for Radiation Treatment Planning of Prostate Cancer on Computed Tomography

Abstract

Purpose: Meticulous manual delineations of the prostate and the surrounding organs at risk are necessary for prostate cancer radiation therapy to avoid side effects to the latter. This process is time consuming and hampered by inter- and intraobserver variability, all of which could be alleviated by artificial intelligence (AI). This study aimed to evaluate the performance of AI compared with manual organ delineations on computed tomography (CT) scans for radiation treatment planning. Methods and Materials: Manual delineations of the prostate, urinary bladder, and rectum of 1530 patients with prostate cancer who received curative radiation therapy from 2006 to 2018 were included. Approximately 50% of those CT scans were used as a training set, 25% as a validation set, and 25% as a test set. Patients with hip prostheses were excluded because of metal artifacts. After training and fine-tuning with the validation set, automated delineations of the prostate and organs at risk were obtained for the test set. Sørensen-Dice similarity coefficient, mean surface distance, and Hausdorff distance were used to evaluate the agreement between the manual and automated delineations. Results: The median Sørensen-Dice similarity coefficient between the manual and AI delineations was 0.82, 0.95, and 0.88 for the prostate, urinary bladder, and rectum, respectively. The median mean surface distance and Hausdorff distance were 1.7 and 9.2 mm for the prostate, 0.7 and 6.7 mm for the urinary bladder, and 1.1 and 13.5 mm for the rectum, respectively. Conclusions: Automated CT-based organ delineation for prostate cancer radiation treatment planning is feasible and shows good agreement with manually performed contouring.