A computational tool for the efficient analysis of dose‐volume histograms for radiation therapy treatment plans

Abstract

A Histogram Analysis in Radiation Therapy (HART) program was primarily developed to increase the efficiency and accuracy of dose-volume histogram (DVH) analysis of large quantities of patient data in radiation therapy research. The program was written in MATLAB to analyze patient plans exported from the treatment planning system (Pinnacle 3 ) in the American Association of Physicists in Medicine/Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (AAPM/RTOG) format. HART-computed DVH data was validated against manually extracted data from the planning system for five head and neck cancer patients treated with the intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) technique. HART calculated over 4000 parameters from the differential DVH (dDVH) curves for each patient in approximately 10-15 minutes. Manual extraction of this amount of data required 5 to 6 hours. The normalized root mean square deviation (NRMSD) for the HART-extracted DVH outcomes was less than 1%, or within 0.5% distance-to-agreement (DTA). This tool is supported with various user-friendly options and graphical displays. Additional features include optimal polynomial modeling of DVH curves for organs, treatment plan indices (TPI) evaluation, plan-specific outcome analysis (POA), and spatial DVH (zDVH) and dose surface histogram (DSH) analyses, respectively. HART is freely available to the radiation oncology community.