Med Phys
-
Clinical Trial
A support vector machine (SVM) for predicting preferred treatment position in radiotherapy of patients with breast cancer.
NYU 05-181 protocol compared the CT simulation in both supine and prone positions for 400 patients with breast cancer (200 left-breast and 200 right-breast) to identify which setup is better at sparing heart and lung involvement in the treatment process. The results demonstrated that all right-breast patients benefited from the prone treatment position, while for left-breast patients, 85% were better treated prone and 15% were better treated supine. Using the clinical data collected from this protocol, the authors aimed at developing an automated tool capable of identifying which of the left-breast cancer patients are better treated supine without obtaining a second CT scan in the supine position. ⋯ The authors' study showed that a feature-based classifier is feasible for predicting the preferred treatment position, based on features extracted from prone CT scans. The two-stage classifier achieved very high specificity at an acceptable expense of sensitivity.