Exploiting tumor shrinkage through temporal optimization of radiotherapy

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Authors
Unkelbach, Jan
Craft, David
Hong, Theodore
Papp, David
Ramakrishnan, Jagdish
Salari, Ehsan
Wolfgang, John
Bortfeld, Thomas
Advisors
Issue Date
2014-06-21
Type
Article
Keywords
Temporal optimization , Split-course radiotherapy , Tumor shrinkage , Liver tumors
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Citation
Unkelbach, Jan; Craft, David; Hong, Theodore; Papp, David; Ramakrishnan, Jagdish; Salari, Ehsan; Wolfgang, John; Bortfeld, Thomas. 2014. Exploiting tumor shrinkage through temporal optimization of radiotherapy. Physics in Medicine and Biology, vol. 59:no. 12:ppg 3059-3079
Abstract

In multi-stage radiotherapy, a patient is treated in several stages separated by weeks or months. This regimen has been motivated mostly by radiobiological considerations, but also provides an approach to reduce normal tissue dose by exploiting tumor shrinkage. The paper considers the optimal design of multi-stage treatments, motivated by the clinical management of large liver tumors for which normal liver dose constraints prohibit the administration of an ablative radiation dose in a single treatment. We introduce a dynamic tumor model that incorporates three factors: radiation induced cell kill, tumor shrinkage, and tumor cell repopulation. The design of multi-stage radiotherapy is formulated as a mathematical optimization problem in which the total dose to the normal tissue is minimized, subject to delivering the prescribed dose to the tumor. Based on the model, we gain insight into the optimal administration of radiation over time, i.e. the optimal treatment gaps and dose levels. We analyze treatments consisting of two stages in detail. The analysis confirms the intuition that the second stage should be delivered just before the tumor size reaches a minimum and repopulation overcompensates shrinking. Furthermore, it was found that, for a large range of model parameters, approximately one-third of the dose should be delivered in the first stage. The projected benefit of multi-stage treatments in terms of normal tissue sparing depends on model assumptions. However, the model predicts large dose reductions by more than a factor of 2 for plausible model parameters. The analysis of the tumor model suggests that substantial reduction in normal tissue dose can be achieved by exploiting tumor shrinkage via an optimal design of multi-stage treatments. This suggests taking a fresh look at multi-stage radiotherapy for selected disease sites where substantial tumor regression translates into reduced target volumes.

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Publisher
IOP Publishing
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Series
Physics in Medicine and Biology;v.59:no.12
PubMed ID
DOI
ISSN
0031-9155
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