Paper ID: 2403.04175

Understanding the PULSAR Effect in Combined Radiotherapy and Immunotherapy through Attention Mechanisms with a Transformer Model

Hao Peng, Casey Moore, Debabrata Saha, Steve Jiang, Robert Timmerman

PULSAR (personalized, ultra-fractionated stereotactic adaptive radiotherapy) is the adaptation of stereotactic ablative radiotherapy towards personalized cancer management. For the first time, we applied a transformer-based attention mechanism to investigate the underlying interactions between combined PULSAR and PD-L1 blockade immunotherapy based on a murine cancer model (Lewis Lung Carcinoma, LLC). The proposed approach is able to predict the trend of tumor volume change semi-quantitatively, and excels in identifying the potential causal relationships through both self-attention and cross-attention scores.

Submitted: Mar 7, 2024