Towards fast human-centred contouring workflows for adaptive external beam radiotherapy

Towards fast human-centred contouring workflows for adaptive external beam radiotherapy

Chaves-de-Plaza, Nicolas F. (TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Mody, P. (TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualisation; Leiden University Medical Center)
Hildebrandt, K.A. (TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Staring, M. (TU Delft Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics)
Astreinidou, Eleftheria (Leiden University Medical Center)
de Ridder, Mischa (University Medical Center Utrecht)
de Ridder, H. (TU Delft Human Information Communication Design)
van Egmond, R. (TU Delft Human Information Communication Design)

2022

Delineation of tumours and organs-at-risk permits detecting and correcting changes in the patients' anatomy throughout the treatment, making it a core step of adaptive external beam radiotherapy. Although auto-contouring technologies have sped up this process, the time needed to perform the quality assessment of the generated contours remains a bottleneck, taking clinicians between several minutes and an hour to complete. The authors of this article conducted several interviews and an observational study at two treatment centres in the Netherlands to identify challenges and opportunities for speeding up the delineation process in adaptive therapies. The study revealed three contextual variables that influence contouring performance: usable additional information, applicable domain-specific knowledge, and available editing capabilities in contouring software. In practice, clinicians leverage these variables to accelerate contouring in two ways. First, they use domain-specific knowledge and relevant clinical features such as the proximity of the organs-at-risk to the tumour to enable targeted inspection of the delineation. Second, clinicians modulate editing precision depending on the effect they anticipate the edit will have on the patient outcome. By implementing these acceleration strategies in guidelines and contouring tools, developers and workflow builders could increase contouring efficiency and consistency without affecting the patient outcome.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b688cc21-fafb-4ab5-8fe2-11cd5cd01d02

2023-07-01

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter 2022 Annual Conference

Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter, 2022-04-01 → , Torino, Italy

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

book chapter

© 2022 Nicolas F. Chaves-de-Plaza, P. Mody, K.A. Hildebrandt, M. Staring, Eleftheria Astreinidou, Mischa de Ridder, H. de Ridder, R. van Egmond