Enhanced 3D dose prediction for hypofractionated SRS (gamma knife radiosurgery) in brain tumor using cascaded-deep-supervised convolutional neural network

Gamma Knife radiosurgery (GKRS) is a well-established technique in radiation therapy (RT) for treating small-size brain tumors. It administers highly concentrated doses during each treatment fraction, with even minor dose errors posing a significant risk of causing severe damage to healthy tissues. It underscores the critical need for precise and meticulous precision in GKRS. However, the planning process for GKRS is complex and time-consuming, heavily reliant on the expertise of medical physicists. Incorporating deep learning approaches for GKRS dose prediction can reduce this dependency, improve planning efficiency and homogeneity, streamline clinical workflows, and reduce patient lagging times. Despite this, precise Gamma Knife plan dose distribution prediction using existing models remains a significant challenge. The complexity stems from the intricate nature of dose distributions, subtle contrasts in CT scans, and the interdependence of dosimetric metrics. To overcome these challenges, we have developed a “Cascaded-Deep-Supervised” Convolutional Neural Network (CDS-CNN) that employs a hybrid-weighted optimization scheme. Our innovative method incorporates multi-level deep supervision and a strategic sequential multi-network training approach. It enables the extraction of intra-slice and inter-slice features, leading to more realistic dose predictions with additional contextual information. CDS-CNN was trained and evaluated using data from 105 brain cancer patients who underwent GKRS treatment, with 85 cases used for training and 20 for testing. Quantitative assessments and statistical analyses demonstrated high consistency between the predicted dose distributions and the reference doses from the treatment planning system (TPS). The 3D overall gamma passing rates (GPRs) reached 97.15% ± 1.36% (3 mm/3%, 10% threshold), surpassing the previous best performance by 2.53% using the 3D Dense U-Net model. When evaluated against more stringent criteria (2 mm/3%, 10% threshold, and 1 mm/3%, 10% threshold), the overall GPRs still achieved 96.53% ± 1.08% and 95.03% ± 1.18%. Furthermore, the average target coverage (TC) was 98.33% ± 1.16%, dose selectivity (DS) was 0.57 ± 0.10, gradient index (GI) was 2.69 ± 0.30, and homogeneity index (HI) was 1.79 ± 0.09. Compared to the 3D Dense U-Net, CDS-CNN predictions demonstrated a 3.5% improvement in TC, and CDS-CNN’s dose prediction yielded better outcomes than the 3D Dense U-Net across all evaluation criteria. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed CDS-CNN model outperformed other models in predicting GKRS dose distributions, with predictions closely matching the TPS doses.