2018 TROG: SRS Brain Plan Study Results

This post contains the following:

1. Summary
2. A walkthrough of a few interesting plans
3. Lists of high performers (top 50)

1. Summary

The SRS brain plan study for the TROG 2018 annual meeting was a success. The scientific planning team was made up of Nick Hardcastle, Laura O’Connor, John Shakeshaft, Annette Haworth, Olivia Cook, and Monica Harris. They did a great job of selecting a good dataset and designing a plan scoring algorithm that was both challenging and comprehensive.

The results were first presented at the 2018 TROG annual meeting, which took place on March 19-22 in Hobart, Tasmania. Click here to download a copy of their presentation. (You can also find this presentation on the “Learn” tab of this plan study’s module.)

Interactive population results are activated for this plan study. Feel free to visit there, where you can see the distribution of scores and all metric results, measure comparative effectiveness of different delivery modalities and planning systems, and even look for interesting correlations with the custom scatterplot tool. Just sign in to ProKnow, select organization “TROG Cancer Research,” select the SRS Brain plan study, then go to the “Population Results” tab. Even if you did not participate by submitting a plan, you can still visit and study the results. It’s free and open to all!

2. A Walk-through of a Few Interesting Plans

3. High Performers (Top 50)

A list of the high scorers by absolute plan score is shown in the table below.

We have not filtered out any plans of questionable practicality (very high monitor units, number of beams, etc.), but it is certainly a good topic of conversation for future studies. “Practicality” is hard to quantify based on DICOM files alone, especially for SRS plans, but you can see from the results below that some planners produced very high plan scores with some pretty efficient delivery schemes.