Reduction of clinical safety margins in proton therapy enabled by the clinical implementation of dual-energy CT for direct stopping-power prediction

Purpose To quantifiy the range uncertainty in proton treatment planning using dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) for a direct stopping-power prediction (DirectSPR) algorithm and its clinical implementation. Methods and materials To assess the overall uncertainty in stopping-power ratio (SPR) prediction of a DirectSPR implementation calibrated for different patient geometries, the influencing factors were categorized in imaging, modeling as well as others. The respective SPR uncertainty was quantified for lung, soft tissue and bone and translated into range uncertainty for several tumor types. The amount of healthy tissue spared was quantified for 250 patients treated with DirectSPR and the dosimetric impact was evaluated exemplarily for a representative brain-tumor patient. Results For bone, soft tissue and lung, an SPR uncertainty (1σ) of 1.6%, 1.3% and 1.3% was determined for DirectSPR, respectively. This allowed for a reduction of the clinically applied range uncertainty from currently (3.5% + 2 mm) to (1.7% + 2 mm) for brain-tumor and (2.0% + 2 mm) for prostate-cancer patients. The 150 brain-tumor and 100 prostate-cancer patients treated using DirectSPR benefitted from sparing on average 2.6 mm and 4.4 mm of healthy tissue in beam direction, respectively. In the representative patient case, dose reduction in organs at risk close to the target volume was achieved, with a mean dose reduction of up to 16% in the brainstem. Patient-specific DECT-based treatment planning with reduced safety margins was successfully introduced into clinical routine. Conclusions A substantial increase in range prediction accuracy in clinical proton treatment planning was achieved by patient-specific DECT-based SPR prediction. For the first time, a relevant imaging-based reduction of range prediction uncertainty on a 2% level has been achieved.