ROR Enhances the Plan Challenge Process

One of the obstacles we all face is the lack of established scientific standards for planning and contouring, resulting in a wide variability in the definition of a “good plan”. Our mission is not to define standards that are slow to be adopted and cumbersome to change; rather it is to… gather, document, evaluate, and share the best practices in a continuous improvement model.

Our vision for the Plan Challenges are to launch a more robust, collaborative process for the field of radiation therapy. As a result, we have convened the conversation and have built the platform for this conversation to take place. Previous contour and plan challenges have documented a wide variability between plans. Participants have engaged us regarding the evaluation criteria and comparative measures that we have employed.

1. We provide “Gold” contours to focus the comparative evaluation to just treatment planning thus removing one major source of variability in treatment planning.
2. We have engaged other like-minded clinicians about their evaluation criteria, their priority, and how they will be measured objectively.

The results of those discussions have yielded a Plan Quality Metric by which we will be able to score plan submissions, and advance the understanding of the field in a significantway. Our Plan Quality Metric will evaluate:

1. PTV68 D95
2. PTV56 D95
3. GTV68 D99
4. PTV68 D110
5. RECTUM V68
6. D105 PTV56
7. Hotspots outside PTV
8. RECTUM V65
9. RECTUM V40
10. BLADDER V65
11. GLOBAL MAX LOCATION
12. RECTUM 50% EVALUATION
13. CONFORMALITY
14. BLADDER V40

We believe that we are the first to attempt this with hundreds of clinicians in an experiential learning environment. Our goal was never to be the ones who set the standards or even to judge the work of our peers. However you, our colleagues, challenged us to define not what is merely acceptable but to seek out what is possible.