Introducing RapidPlan
The planning time of a typical prostate treatment can be cut down considerably by using RapidPlan, an extension of Varian's integrated Eclipse treatment planning system.
(Left: Single arc 10FFF prostate treatment planned with RapidPlan using own model. Note the estimation bands in the DVH plot. Right: DIAMOND pretreatment QA calculation showing excellent results.)
In an April 2016 soft launch, KFJ Physics group started to use its own DVH estimation model for clinical treatment planning of the prostate1. In a busy department where more than 50% of all treatments are using VMAT, products like RapidPlan are always warmly received.
What is RapidPlan?
The idea of RapidPlan is to take a number of excellent treatment plans and to use these existing plans to train a DVH estimation model. When this model is then applied to a new case, RapidPlan will generate DVH estimates for each organ at risk in the form of bands (see above screenshot). These DVH bands mark the upper and lower bounds that can be achieved during optimization.
RapidPlan will also automatically generate objectives and priorities for the actual case, to achieve the optimal planning result. By doing this, RapidPlan breaks up the cycle of setting objectives - optimization - evaluation - changing objectives - optimization - evaluation - ... which can also be done interactively.
If set up properly, RapidPlan will always generate an "optimal" plan: a plan that cannot be imploved further manually.
(Model Configuration user interface)
RapidPlan is in now clinical use in our department. Experiences after one month are very positive!
Notes
1More own models, such as a head & neck model with multiple targets are currently under development.