Dosimetrically triggered adaptive radiotherapy for head and neck cancer: Considerations for the implementation of clinical protocols

Abstract Purpose Defining dosimetric rules to automatically detect patients requiring adaptive radiotherapy (ART) is not straightforward, and most centres perform ad‐hoc ART with no specific protocol. This study aims to propose and analyse different steps to design a protocol for dosimetrically triggered ART of head and neck (H&N) cancer. As a proof‐of‐concept, the designed protocol was applied to patients treated in TomoTherapy units, using their available software for daily MVCT image and dose accumulation. Methods An initial protocol was designed by a multidisciplinary team, with a set of flagging criteria based only on dose‐volume metrics, including two action levels: (1) surveillance (orange flag), and (2) immediate verification (red flag). This protocol was adapted to the clinical needs following an iterative process. First, the protocol was applied to 38 H&N patients with daily imaging. Automatic software generated the daily contours, recomputed the daily dose and flagged the dosimetric differences with respect to the planning dose. Second, these results were compared, by a sensitivity/specificity test, to the answers of a physician. Third, the physician, supported by the multidisciplinary team, performed a self‐analysis of the provided answers and translated them into mathematical rules in order to upgrade the protocol. The upgraded protocol was applied to different definitions of the target volume (i.e. deformed CTV + 0, 2 and 4 mm), in order to quantify how the number of flags decreases when reducing the CTV‐to‐PTV margin. Results The sensitivity of the initial protocol was very low, specifically for the orange flags. The best values were 0.84 for red and 0.15 for orange flags. After the review and upgrade process, the sensitivity of the upgraded protocol increased to 0.96 for red and 0.84 for orange flags. The number of patients flagged per week with the final (upgraded) protocol decreased in median by 26% and 18% for red and orange flags, respectively, when reducing the CTV‐to‐PTV margin from 4 to 2 mm. This resulted in only one patient flagged at the last fraction for both red and orange flags. Conclusion Our results demonstrate the value of iterative protocol design with retrospective data, and shows the feasibility of automatically‐triggered ART using simple dosimetric rules to mimic the physician's decisions. Using a proper target volume definition is important and influences the flagging rate, particularly when decreasing the CTV‐to‐PTV margin.