Deep Learning-Based Head and Neck Radiotherapy Planning Dose Prediction via Beam-Wise Dose Decomposition

Accurate dose map prediction is key to external radiotherapy. Previous methods have achieved promising results; however, most of these methods learn the dose map as a black box without considering the beam-shaped radiation for treatment delivery in clinical practice. The accuracy is usually limited, especially on beam paths. To address this problem, this paper describes a novel "disassembling-then-assembling" strategy to consider the dose prediction task from the nature of radiotherapy. Specifically, a global-to-beam network is designed to first predict dose values of the whole image space and then utilize the proposed innovative beam masks to decompose the dose map into multiple beam-based sub-fractions in a beam-wise manner. This can disassemble the difficult task to a few easy-to-learn tasks. Furthermore, to better capture the dose distribution in region-of-interest (ROI), we introduce two novel value-based and criteria-based dose volume histogram (DVH) losses to supervise the framework. Experimental results on the public OpenKBP challenge dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially on beam paths, creating a trustable and interpretable AI solution for radiotherapy treatment planning. Our code is available at https://github.com/ukaukaaaa/BeamDosePrediction .