Feasibility study of beam orientation class-solutions for prostate IMRT.

IMRT is being increasingly used for treatment of prostate cancer. In practice, however, the beam orientations used for the treatments are still selected empirically, without any guideline. The purpose of this work was to investigate interpatient variation of the optimal beam configuration and to facilitate intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) prostate treatment planning by proposing a set of beam orientation class-solutions for a range of numbers of incident beams. We used fifteen prostate cases to generate the beam orientation class-solutions. For each patient and a given number of incident beams, a multiobjective optimization engine was employed to provide optimal beam directions. For the fifteen cases considered, the gantry angle of any of the optimized plans were all distributed within a certain range The angular distributions of the optimal beams were analyzed and the most selected directions are identified as optimal directions. The optimal directions for all patients are averaged to obtain the class-solution. The class-solution gantry angles for prostate IMRT were found to be: three beams (0 degrees, 120 degrees, 240 degrees), five beams (35 degrees, 110 degrees, 180 degrees, 250 degrees, 325 degrees), six beams (0 degrees, 60 degrees, 120 degrees, 180 degrees, 240 degrees, 300 degrees), seven beams (25 degrees, 75 degrees, 130 degrees, 180 degrees, 230 degrees, 285 degrees, 335 degrees), eight beams (20 degrees, 70 degrees, 110 degrees, 150 degrees, 200 degrees, 250 degrees, 290 degrees, 340 degrees), and nine beams (20 degrees, 60 degrees, 100 degrees, 140 degrees, 180 degrees, 220 degrees, 260 degrees, 300 degrees, 340 degrees). The level of validity of the class-solutions was tested using an additional clinical prostate case by comparing with the individually optimized beam configurations. The difference between the plans obtained with class-solutions and patient-specific optimizations was found to be clinically insignificant.