目的:开发一种新颖的交互式可视化方法,用于探索放射治疗计划,重点关注重叠体积,目的是保留健康组织。
方法:我们提出了一种可视化方法,以在放射治疗计划评估过程中包括重叠体积。可以交互地探索定量属性以识别关键区域,并用于引导可视化以对候选人进行详细检查。我们通过一项用户研究评估了我们的方法,该研究涵盖了个体可视化及其关于帮助的互动,可理解性,直觉,决策和速度。
结果:使用我们的软件对三位领域专家进行了一项用户研究,并通过执行一组任务和填写问卷来评估五个数据集,每个数据集代表不同类型的癌症和位置。结果表明,可视化和相互作用有助于根据其物理和剂量特性识别和评估重叠体积。此外,寻找剂量热点的任务也可以从我们的方法中受益。
结论:结果表明,在保留健康组织方面,有可能增强当前治疗计划评估过程。
OBJECTIVE: Development of a novel interactive visualization approach for the exploration of radiotherapy treatment plans with a focus on overlap volumes with the aim of healthy tissue sparing.
METHODS: We propose a visualization approach to include overlap volumes in the radiotherapy treatment plan evaluation process. Quantitative properties can be interactively explored to identify critical regions and used to steer the visualization for a detailed inspection of candidates. We evaluated our approach with a user study covering the individual visualizations and their interactions regarding helpfulness, comprehensibility, intuitiveness, decision-making and speed.
RESULTS: A user study with three domain experts was conducted using our software and evaluating five data sets each representing a different type of cancer and location by performing a set of tasks and filling out a questionnaire. The results show that the visualizations and interactions help to identify and evaluate overlap volumes according to their physical and dose properties. Furthermore, the task of finding dose hot spots can also benefit from our approach.
CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate the potential to enhance the current treatment plan evaluation process in terms of healthy tissue sparing.