Treatment Planning

Treatment planning for cancer radiotherapy, where an optimal treatment strategy is designed for each individual patient and executed for the whole treatment course, is analogous to the design of a blueprint for building construction. If a treatment plan is poorly designed, the desired treatment outcome cannot be achieved, no matter how well other components of radiation therapy are performed. In the current clinical workflow, a treatment planner works towards a good quality plan in a trial-and-error fashion. Many rounds of consultation between the planner and physician are needed to reach a plan of physician’s satisfaction, because physician’s preference for a particular patient can hardly be quantified and precisely conveyed to the planner. Consequently, planning time can be up to a week for complex cases and plan quality may be poor and can vary significantly due to varying levels of physician and planner’s skills and physician-planner cooperation, etc., which substantially deteriorates treatment outcomes.

We believe that AI technologies have a great potential to revolutionize treatment planning. Treatment planning consists of two major aspects: commonality and individuality. By exploiting the commonality through deep supervised learning, we can develop a treatment plan as good as those for previously treated similar patients. The individuality can be actualized by learning physician’s special considerations for a particular patient using deep reinforcement learning. We believe that an AI-based intelligent treatment planning system can consistently produce high-quality treatment plans with extremely high efficiency.