Evaluation of the radiobiological impact of anatomic modifications during radiation therapy for head and neck cancer: can we simply summate the dose?

Background and purpose: Adaptive strategies in radiotherapy (RT) require the knowledge of the total dose given to every organ of the body. Because of anatomical changes and setup errors non-rigid registration is necessary to map the different dose fractions to a common reference. This study evaluates practically if the accumulation of all of these registered dose fractions must take radiobiology into account in a classical clinical setting.

Materials and methods: Ten patients with head and neck tumors treated by chemo-RT were used. Contrast-enhanced CT scans were acquired prior and during RT following delivery of mean doses of 14.2, 24.5, 35.0 and 44.9 Gy and the planned pre-treatment helical tomotherapy sinograms were applied on the per-treatment CTs to create a series of per-treatment dose distributions corresponding to each per-treatment CT image. In order to calculate the cumulative dose distribution, the per-treatment dose maps were non-rigidly deformed by using the deformation map computed by a non-rigid registration. The deformed dose maps were then summed in two ways: one while taking radiobiology into account and one without. These two strategies were compared using clinical surrogates in the target volumes (TV) and in surrounding organs at risk (OAR).

Results: The differences between the strategies, while statistically significant (p<0.05), are clinically irrelevant. In the OARs, the mean differences stay in the 0.01-0.07 Gy range for the total dose. In the targets, all mean differences stay in the 0.001-0.012 Gy range. However, some local high difference spots appear leading to punctual errors as high as 2.5 Gy.

Conclusion: If using current radiotherapy practices and clinical recommendations based on dose surrogates computed globally on OARs and TVs, one does not need to take radiobiological effects into account while accumulating total dose as these lead to very small differences compared to a simple accumulation technique consisting of a linear sum of the dose fractions. However, care must be taken if other adaptive strategies, based on local rather than global information, are used.