Facilitating MR-Guided Adaptive Proton Therapy in Children Using Deep Learning-Based Synthetic CT

Purpose: To determine whether self-attention cycle-generative adversarial networks (cycle-GANs), a novel deep-learning method, can generate accurate synthetic computed tomography (sCT) to facilitate adaptive proton therapy in children with brain tumors. Materials and Methods: Both CT and T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 125 children (ages 1-20 years) with brain tumors were included in the training dataset. A model introducing a self-attention mechanism into the conventional cycle-GAN was created to enhance tissue interfaces and reduce noise. The test dataset consisted of 7 patients (ages 2-14 years) who underwent adaptive planning because of changes in anatomy discovered on MRI during proton therapy. The MRI during proton therapy-based sCT was compared with replanning CT (ground truth). Results: The Hounsfield unit-mean absolute error was significantly reduced with self-attention cycle-GAN, as compared with conventional cycle-GAN (65.3 +/- 13.9 versus 88.9 +/- 19.3, P < .01). The average 3-dimensional gamma passing rates (2%/2 mm criteria) for the original plan on the anatomy of the day and for the adapted plan were high (97.6% +/- 1.2% and 98.9 +/- 0.9%, respectively) when using sCT generated by self-attention cycle-GAN. The mean absolute differences in clinical target volume (CTV) receiving 95% of the prescription dose and 80% distal falloff along the beam axis were 1.1% +/- 0.8% and 1.1 +/- 0.9 mm, respectively. Areas of greatest dose difference were distal to the CTV and corresponded to shifts in distal falloff. Plan adaptation was appropriately triggered in all test patients when using sCT. Conclusion: The novel cycle-GAN model with self-attention outperforms conventional cycle-GAN for children with brain tumors. Encouraging dosimetric results suggest that sCT generation can be used to identify patients who would benefit from adaptive replanning.