While previous studies have shown a benefit of MR-based image guidance and gating for pulmonary and abdominal malignancies (13, 16–18), it is still an open question whether daily treatment plan adaptation and reoptimization is truly beneficial for all patients. As online treatment reoptimization not only entails time burden for the radiation oncologist, physicist, and therapist, but also prolongs patient-on-table time by around 30 minutes, a prediction of whether a particular patient might profit from daily on-table adaptive replanning could significantly impact MRgRT processes. We therefore investigated whether and in which patients SMART may provide a dosimetric benefit by comprehensive DVH analysis of baseline treatment plans after rigid setup correction without re-optimization versus daily adapted plans – overlaid on the anatomy-of-the-day – on a per patient basis.
The present analysis showed that daily on-table adaptive replanning in patients with liver metastases improved PTV coverage in 63 % of the applied fractions compared to a rigid shift. Previous studies have reported similar findings for patients with abdominal malignancies, where daily on-table adaptive replanning MRgRT increased PTV coverage in approximately 66% of all fractions (13, 18). For pulmonary malignancies, adaptive treatment has been reported to improve PTV coverage in 61 % of fractions (16). These previous studies did, however, not analyze if daily on-table adaptive replanning is necessary in all patients or can safely be omitted in a specific cohort.
The benefit of treatment adaptation on PTV coverage was higher for patients with a metastasis in close proximity to an OAR compared to patients, where the GTV was at a large distance to the OARs (in Fig. 4). The increased benefit for patients with a metastasis in close proximity to an OAR may be caused by daily positional changes of OAR, such as bowel filling and movement, by daily set-up changes. With a limited number of data points between 1 and 2 cm distance of OAR to GTV, the present recommendation for daily adaptive re-planning for a patient cohort with a distance of < 2 cm of the GTV to the OAR may well be too conservative but seems reasonable and feasible.
As the observed median differences for GTV and PTV volumes after plan adaptation in comparison to the BP were 0.0 cc and 0.4 cc respectively, these can be regarded as negligible. These slight variations in PTV volume were most probably caused by anatomical alterations leading to an altered CTV volume and/or inter-observer variability. As the Viewray planning software does not include the possibility to rotate a contoured structure in case of patient rotations, recontouring in some slices may also lead to slight alterations. The volume of the GTV did not change from the BP to the RP in 26/75 (34 %) of all fractions. Only 7 of these 26 fractions (27%) corresponded to situations where the PTV was more than 2 cm away from the OAR. This indicates that GTV recontouring was not dependent on its proximity to the OAR.
While improving PTV coverage, online adaptation furthermore achieved lower or maintained equal doses in OARs (D1cc and Dmean) for 54 % of the applied fractions. Henke et al. reported that daily adaption could allow OAR violations to be successfully reversed in all plans, naming the primary purpose of adaption reversing OAR constraint violation in 75 % of cases (13). The constraints of the trial by Henke et al. were, however, less conservative than the ones employed in the present study and this could explain the observed difference.
While the required time for online adaptation exceeds durations for typical SBRT fractions, it corresponds to procedures such as robotic SBRT or brachytherapy (19, 20). With the advent of technical advancements, such as automated adaption, future treatment times for SMART could even be reduced considerably (21). Therefore, this study results may not be as relevant in the future as now, when treatment times will be significantly reduced. However, currently every effort to reduce slot time is relevant to provide sufficient machine time to treat all patients suitable for MRgRT.