Technical Note: Acceleration of online adaptive replanning with automation and parallel operations

PURPOSE Limited by various human interventions and manual operations, the routine practice of online adaptive replanning (OLAR) is time consuming and impractical with the current planning technology. To accelerate OLAR and to minimize human efforts, the methods and software tools are developed to automate OLAR workflow and to use parallel processing during OLAR. METHODS Speedy online adaptive replanning SOLAR, a software tool, was developed to automate the OLAR workflow and to implement parallel operation in plan generation and contour editing. The SOLAR tool is designed to automate and monitor the operation of OLAR on multiple client workstations and to allow parallel manual contour editing and plan generation with multiple workstations. The performance of the SOLAR tool was tested on selected prostate and pancreatic cancer cases. RESULTS The SOLAR system has been tested in the clinical environment. With the automation and parallel operations, the operation time for OLAR can be reduced by 70%, allowing OLAR to be completed within 10 min for the tested prostate cancer cases and within 15 min for the pancreatic cancer cases. The SOLAR system generated superior plans compared to the standard repositioning method. CONCLUSION SOLAR software was developed to accelerate online adaptive replanning workflow with automation and parallel operations. By reducing the time and human intervention, thus, reducing potential human error, the SOLAR solution would improve the practicality of OLAR.