Human-like intelligent automatic treatment planning of head and neck cancer radiation therapy

Automatic treatment planning of radiation therapy (RT) is desired to ensure plan quality, improve planning efficiency, and reduce human errors. We have proposed an Intelligent Automatic Treatment Planning framework with a virtual treatment planner (VTP), an artificial intelligence robot built using deep reinforcement learning, autonomously operating a treatment planning system (TPS). This study extends our previous successes in relatively simple prostate cancer RT planning to head-and-neck (H&N) cancer, a more challenging context even for human planners due to multiple prescription levels, proximity of targets to critical organs, and tight dosimetric constraints.