RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is related to co-pending and co-owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 16/833,752, entitled AUTOMATICALLY-PLANNED RADIATION-BASED TREATMENT and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 16/833,801, entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS TO DERIVE AND UTILIZE VIRTUAL VOLUMETRIC STRUCTURES FOR PREDICTING POTENTIAL COLLISIONS WHEN ADMINISTERING THERAPEUTIC RADIATION, both filed on even date herewith, the contents of which are fully incorporated herein by this reference.

TECHNICAL FIELD

These teachings relate generally to the use of radiation as a therapeutic treatment and more specifically to the formation and use of corresponding radiation-treatment plans that accommodate a patient fixation device.

BACKGROUND

The use of radiation to treat medical conditions comprises a known area of prior art endeavor. For example, radiation therapy comprises an important component of many treatment modalities for reducing or eliminating unwanted tumors. Unfortunately, applied radiation does not inherently discriminate between unwanted materials and adjacent tissues, organs, or the like that are desired or even critical to continued survival of the patient. As a result, radiation is ordinarily applied in a carefully administered manner to at least attempt to restrict the radiation to a given target volume. A so-called radiation treatment plan serves in the foregoing regards.

Treatment plans serve to specify any number of operating parameters as pertain to the administration of such treatment with respect to a given patient and a particular real-world physical radiation treatment platform. Such treatment plans are often optimized prior to use. (As used herein, “optimization” will be understood to refer to improving upon a candidate treatment plan without necessarily ensuring that the optimized result is, in fact, the singular best solution.) Many optimization approaches use an automated incremental methodology where various optimization results are calculated and tested in turn using a variety of automatically-modified (i.e., “incremented”) treatment plan optimization parameters.

A radiation treatment plan planning workflow typically involves numerous manual and iterative steps. This is particularly so when inverse planning-based techniques, such as IMRT and VMAT, are employed. At each of a series of steps decisions/choices are made that may often affect later stages. Such factors can lead to an overly complex planning workflow when only simple 3-D planning may be necessary (for example, to develop a treatment plan to address breast cancer). In particular, a physician must often manually segment the target structures and the organs at risk via a time-consuming process that is also prone to observer variability. That variability, in turn, can be exacerbated by the field set up that must be determined manually before beginning the optimization process and by the definition of appropriate objectives for the optimizer. This segmentation activity can be further challenged with patient fixation devices are in play, as those devices are often, at least to some extent, evident in the computed tomography images that inform such activity.

Because exploring all or most possible combinations typically comprises a time-consuming and computationally expensive process, in some application settings users may opt to proceed with a simpler approach or simply a previously known practice. Making that choice, however, can greatly limit the options that may be available and suitable to consider for a particular patient.

Other limitations are also found in the prior art. For example, while one prior art approach estimates multiple scripted plans for different treatment units, those plans are not created to take collision avoidance into account and typically are neither ready for delivery nor suitably customized for a particular patient.

