Abstract
With the massive use of computers, the growth and explosion of data has greatly promoted the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The rise of deep learning (DL) algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), has provided radiation oncologists with many promising tools that can simplify the complex radiotherapy process in the clinical work of radiation oncology, improve the accuracy and objectivity of diagnosis, and reduce the workload, thus enabling clinicians to spend more time on advanced decision-making tasks. As the development of DL gets closer to clinical practice, radiation oncologists will need to be more familiar with its principles to properly evaluate and use this powerful tool. In this paper, we explain the development and basic concepts of AI and discuss its application in radiation oncology based on different task categories of DL algorithms. This work clarifies the possibility of further development of DL in radiation oncology.
Keywords
Introduction
With the massive use of computers, the growth and explosion of data has greatly promoted the development of artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, AI has been used widely in the medical field to analyze data in pathology, radiology, cardiology, oncology, genomics, and pharmacology to better provide information for diseases prediction, 1 -4 screening, 5 diagnosis, 6,7 treatment, 8 prognosis, health management, and drug development. 9 The various applied research currently underway may lead to the increased use of AI by clinicians, in particular, radiation oncologists. 10 The current clinical practice is both time-consuming and extremely subjective, and the rise of deep learning (DL) algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), can simplify the complex radiotherapy work process in the clinical work of radiation oncology, including image fusion, delineation of clinical target volume (CTV), and organ-at-risk (OAR), automatic planning (AP), dose distribution prediction, and outcome prediction. 11 The application of DL not only improves the accuracy and objectivity of diagnosis but also reduces the workload, thus enabling clinicians to spend more time on advanced decision-making tasks. As the development of DL gets closer to clinical practice, radiation oncologists will need to be familiar with its principles to properly evaluate and use this powerful tool. We explain the development and basic concepts of AI and discuss its application in radiation oncology based on different task categories of DL algorithms. This work clarifies the possibility of further development of DL in radiation oncology.
Basic Concepts
DL task categories in radiation oncology can be divided according to the main purpose of the algorithm, as follows: image fusion, image segmentation, AP, plan evaluation, and prognosis and outcome prediction. The evaluation criteria include receiver operating characteristic curve, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), dose volume histogram, dose difference graph, F1 score, accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, precision, dice similarity coefficient, average accuracy, and Jaccard index. 25
Material and Methods
Here we provide a systematic review of the publications using CNN technology for medical image analysis, available in the National Library of Medicine database (PubMed). The search equation was the following: (convolutional OR deep learning) AND (radiotherapy) AND (image fusion OR image segmentation OR auto-planning and dose distribution prediction OR prediction of efficacy and side effects), filtered for “Human studies” and “Title/Abstract” as search fields.
The selected articles were screened according to a standard grid containing the following items: aim of the study; methods: network architecture, dataset, training, validation, test, comparison method; results: accuracy, sensibility and specificity and conclusion.
Implementation Area
At present, several scholars have applied AI to OAR and CTV for head and neck tumors, lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, rectal cancer, and cervical cancer. 34 -51 Zeineldin et al evaluated the performance of different CNN models in 125 cases of glioma. Compared with manual rendering, the DSC of several CNN models was 81% to 84%. Zeineldin et al believed that different CNN models could be applied to magnetic resonance images and that segmentation of brain tumors was feasible. 34 Deng et al developed a novel brain tumor segmentation method, which integrated the full convolutional neural network (FCNN) and dense micro-block difference feature (DMDF) into a unified framework to segment brain tumors in the MRIs of 100 patients. The average DSC index was as high as 90.98%, and the segmentation time was less than 1s. Compared with the traditional MRI brain tumor segmentation method, the experimental results showed that the segmentation accuracy and stability were greatly improved. 35 Ye et al used an automated method based on CNN for segmentation of nasopharyngeal carcinoma on dual-sequence magnetic resonance imaging. Through automatic contour training of 44 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma, the test results obtained in 7patients had an average DSC of 0.87. 36 Another prospective study used DCNN to train and automatically segment the gross tumor volume (GTV) of 22 patients with head and neck cancer on co-registered positron emission tomography (PET-CT) images. Oncologists and radiologists have manually determined the gold standard of GTV by consensus. The automatic segmentation time is less than 1 min, and the average DSC is 0.785. 37 Tong et al used DNN to segment 9 OARs (brain stem, optic chiasm, mandible, optic nerve, parotid gland, and submandibular gland) in 22 head and neck cases. The average DSC ranged from 0.58 to 0.93. The median time of all OARs was 9.5s. 38 Zhu et al tested the results of automatic segmentation of 9 OARs (brain stem, cross, mandible, left optic nerve, right optic nerve, left parotid gland, right parotid gland, left submandibular gland, and right submandibular gland) in CT images of 261 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma based on a DL framework. Tong’s model used a single network to segment the OAR and to conduct end-to-end training, called AnatomyNet. Zhu et al found that compared with the traditional U-Net model, AnatomyNet improved the DSC by 2% to 3%, and 6 out of 9 anatomical structures were better than those under U-Net. 39 Subsequently, Dai et al proposed a DCNN that used a 3-dimensional U-Net DCNN combined with 2 loss functions of dice loss and generalized dice loss to automatically segment 19 OARs (left and right eyeballs, left and right optic nerves, left and right lenses, left and right inner ears, left and right temporomandibular joints, left and right parotid glands, left and right submandibular glands, brainstem, spinal cord, thyroid, laryngo-esophagus-tracheal (LET), and oral cavity) in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma. A total of 496 patients were enrolled in the group, and 376 cases were randomly selected for use in training set, 60 cases were included in the validation set, and 60 cases were included in the test set. Overall, the average DSC of the 19 high-risk organs was 0.91, and the Jaccard distance was 0.15. Compared with Zhu’s method, the 3-dimensional (3D) U-Net DCNN combined with Dice Loss function could be better applied to the automatic segmentation of head and neck OARs. The 3D U-Net DCNN with the segmentation time within 20S also achieved ideal automatic segmentation results for small-volume OAR. 40 Shapey et al studied the performance of two-and-half-dimensional CNN to automatically segment schwannomas after training in the MRIs of 243 patients with schwannomas. Compared with manual segmentation, the DSC based on T1-weighted segmentation was 93.43%. The DSC for segmentation based on T2 weighting was 93.68%. 41 A prospective study included 126 patients with intracranial meningioma. The target volume contour manually drawn on MRI T1/T2 weights by 2 experienced doctors was compared with the results of a trained DNN. In these patients, a comparison between the DL model and manual segmentation showed that the average DSC of the tumor volume of the enhanced contrast agent was 0.91 ± 0.08, and the average DSC of the total lesion volume was 0.82 ± 0.12. 42 Another study used 2-dimensional CNN to train on 300 patients’ head CT images and automatically segment the ventricles. The results showed that compared with manual rendering, the DSCs of the left, right, and third ventricles were 0.92, 0.92, and 0.79, respectively. 43 Currently, many reports are available on the automatic segmentation of DL for head and neck cancer. Peng used CNN for automatic segmentation of OARs in the chest and abdomen. The research developed and trained a CNN based on U-Net, which included 60 chest CT scan patients and 43 abdominal CT scan patients. Peng et al performed 5 organ segmentations on chest CTs and 8 organ segmentations on abdominal CTs. Compared with manual drawing, the median DSC was 0.97 (right lung), 0.96 (left lung), 0.92 (heart), 0.86 (spinal cord), 0.76 (esophagus), and 0.96 (spleen), 0.96 (liver), 0.95 (Left kidney), 0.90 (stomach), 0.87 (gallbladder), 0.80 (pancreas), 0.75 (esophagus), and 0.61 (duodenum). The automatic segmentation time for each patient did not exceed 5S. The researcher believed that this work shows that the patient’s multiorgan CT image segmentation could be performed with clinically acceptable accuracy and efficiency. 44 Wang et al developed a patient-specific adaptive convolutional neural network (A-NET) to segment lung tumors in 9 patients’ chest MRIs. The patients in the group had a chest MRI every week during radiotherapy. Wang et al took the previously scanned images as the training set and used the latest images for verification. Compared with manual segmentation, the DSC obtained was 0.81 ± 0.10. 45 Another prospective study proposed a new multimodal segmentation method based on 3D FCN that simultaneously considered PET and CT information for lung tumor segmentation. This method was validated on a dataset of 84 lung cancer patients. Compared with the profile drawn by abundant radiation oncologists, the average DSC was 0.85, which achieved significant performance gains compared with CNN-based methods and traditional methods that used only PET or CT. 46 Zabihollahy et al studied a similar ensemble learning model based on U-Net to identify and describe the 3D U-Net of kidney tumors, using contrast-enhanced CT images of 315 patients as training and test sets. Compared with the gold standard, using 3D U-Net to describe the average DSC of kidney tumors was 85.95% ± 1.46%. 47 The research of Chen et al developed a new cervical cancer segmentation method (called PIC-S-CNN). Chen et al compared this method with 6 different segmentation methods and obtained the best segmentation effect, with an average DSC of 0.84. Chen et al believed that the combination of DL and anatomical prior information could improve the accuracy of cervical tumor segmentation. Scholars who have studied models based on CNN to automatically segment pancreatic tumors, 48 liver tumors, 49 colorectal tumors, 50 and prostate tumors 51 have achieved good segmentation results. These findings have shown that DL can save a significant amount of clinician time to delineate CTV and OARS. Most of these delineation results have met the requirements of clinical treatment and achieved better results than those manually delineated by physicians. Not only does this method have high repeatability, but it also can reduce the interobserver variability (IOV) among physicians.
Conclusion
Radiation oncology is a medical specialty that closely integrates technology and computers. It should integrate computer science, statistics, and clinical knowledge. In the process of clinical radiotherapy, AI algorithms can work continuously and efficiently. In particular, the emergence of DL algorithms can automatically perform tedious tasks, reduce the deviation of dose distribution, and predict adverse effects after radiotherapy. CNN training is a key step, for which specific technical skills are required to avoid overfitting limited data, which can lead to problems when using the network to analyze wider data sets. Therefore, training needs to be evaluated and monitored. Training thus requires evaluation and monitoring. This method is expected to become the third hand of radiation oncologists. The open-source nature and public availability of the AI library enable clinical researchers from various fields to research and use AI algorithms, which can improve objectivity, reduce the need for manual intervention, and reduce the amount of staff work. At the same time, the repeatability of the process can be greatly improved. Because DL algorithms are an opaque “black box” of internal operations, applying them to clinical practice remains challenging. 11 Some systems provide partial visualization techniques (heat maps, probability maps) to provide certain views of CNN internal functions. Understanding how these networks “work” is a relevant and significant challenge in medical AI.
Currently available clinically automatic registration and automatic segmentation software based on ML algorithms require manual correction before clinical use, and the segmentation results for small organs are not ideal. 61,62 The current technology and framework have limitations, which include model interpretability, data heterogeneity, and lack of common benchmarks. 63 Even if these AI systems show high accuracy in a laboratory environment, it is difficult to practically verify medical AI systems in clinical work. This difficulty is called the last mile of implementation. 64 Therefore, before clinical implementation, in-depth research is needed to evaluate the performance of DL algorithms. 65 One way to make DL results more acceptable in clinical practice is to enable doctors to understand the internal workings of the equipment they use, and the software must provide data protection, algorithm transparency, and accountability to earn clinician and patient trust. 66 Artificial intelligence has clearly demonstrated its efficiency in radiotherapy tasks, but for most applications, there is still a lack of comparative clinical studies showing that the technology has been integrated into the clinical workflow. Nevertheless, the robustness of the current results and the possible simple interface that can be designed using trained CNNs lay the foundation for direct, time-saving, reliable and practical applications. Then, you can treat CNN as a colleague to provide expert second opinions on difficult clinical issues. In addition, CNN is inherently not affected by chaotic factors such as fatigue, personal beliefs, or hierarchical issues, so inter- and intra-individual variability will be minimized when completing specific tasks.
CNN will completely change all processes in the field of radiotherapy, and the role of practitioners is crucial to the development and implementation of such equipment. By understanding deep learning, participating in the concept and evaluation of new equipment, and by contributing one’s own power to conceive the regulatory framework for this new type of medical activity, the MD now has the opportunity to participate in the scientific revolution.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-tct-10.1177_15330338211016386 - The Application and Development of Deep Learning in Radiotherapy: A Systematic Review
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-tct-10.1177_15330338211016386 for The Application and Development of Deep Learning in Radiotherapy: A Systematic Review by Danju Huang, Han Bai, Li Wang, Yu Hou, Lan Li, Yaoxiong Xia, Zhirui Yan, Wenrui Chen, Li Chang and Wenhui Li in Technology in Cancer Research & Treatment
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-2-tct-10.1177_15330338211016386 - The Application and Development of Deep Learning in Radiotherapy: A Systematic Review
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-2-tct-10.1177_15330338211016386 for The Application and Development of Deep Learning in Radiotherapy: A Systematic Review by Danju Huang, Han Bai, Li Wang, Yu Hou, Lan Li, Yaoxiong Xia, Zhirui Yan, Wenrui Chen, Li Chang and Wenhui Li in Technology in Cancer Research & Treatment
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
Our study did not require an ethical board approval because it did not contain human or animal trials. The authors have completed the STROBE guideline check-list. The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article. Wenhui Li, Li Chang and Danju Huang carried out the concepts, design, definition of intellectual content, literature search, data acquistion and manuscript review. Han Bai and Li Wang provided assistance for data acquistion and manuscript editing. Yu Hou, Lan Li and Yaoxiong Xia carried out literature search and data acquisition. Zhirui Yan and Wenrui Chen performed data acquistion and manuscript preparation. All authors have read and approved the content of the manuscript. Danju Huang, Han Bai, and Li Wang contributed equally to this work.
Acknowledgments
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by grants from Ten-thousand Talents Program of Yunnan Province (Yunling scholar, Youth talent), Yunnan Provincial Training Funds for Middle-Young Academic and Technical Leader candidate (202005AC160025), Yunnan Provincial Training Funds for High-level Health Technical Personnel (No.L-2018001).
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References
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