Voxel based BED and EQD(2) Evaluation of the Radiotherapy Treatment Plan

INTRODUCTION: Three-dimensional (3D) treatment planning of patient undergoing radiotherapy uses complex and meticulous computational algorithms. These algorithms use 3D voxel data of the patient to calculate the radiation dose distribution and display it over the CT image dataset for treatment plan evaluation. AIMS AND OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the present study is the development and implementation of radiobiological evaluation of the radiotherapy treatment plan incorporating the tissue-specific radiobiological parameters. MATERIAL AND METHOD: An indigenous program was written in MATLAB(®) software (version 2011b of Mathworks Inc.) to extract the patient treatment plan data from DICOM-RT files which are exported from the treatment planning system. CT-, Structures- and Dose-Cube matrices are reconstructed from the exported patient plan data. BED and EQD(2) based dose volume histograms (DVHs), colorwash and iso-effective dose curves were generated from the physical Dose-Cube using the linear-quadratic (LQ) formalism and tissue-specific radiobiological parameters (α/β). RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: BED-and EQD(2)-colorwash and iso-effective curves along with BED and EQD(2) dose volume histograms provide superior radiobiological information as compared to those of physical doses. This study provides supplementary recipes of radiobiological doses along with the physical doses which are useful for the evaluation of complex radiotherapy treatment plan of the patients.