Radiotherapy planning is a highly complex process that often varies significantly across institutions and individual planners. Most existing deep learning approaches for 3D dose prediction rely on reference plans as ground truth during training, which can inadvertently bias models toward specific planning styles or institutional preferences. In this study, we introduce a novel generative model that predicts 3D dose distributions based solely on user-defined preference flavors. These customizable preferences enable planners to prioritize specific trade-offs between organs-at-risk (OARs) and planning target volumes (PTVs), offering greater flexibility and personalization. Designed for seamless integration with clinical treatment planning systems, our approach assists users in generating high-quality plans efficiently. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that our method can surpasses the Varian RapidPlan model in both adaptability and plan quality in some scenarios.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Our flexible dose proposer pipeline. Stage I pre-trains a foundational dose decoder, regularizing the dose prediction to be realistic. The second stage trains a flexible dose prediction model with heterogeneous conditions.
Cohort Index
Cohort 0
Cohort 1
Cohort 2
Cohort 3
Cohort 4
Cohort 5
Train/Valid/Test
370/48/54
147/17/19
128/15/17
103/14/12
52/8/7
20/1/4
Table 1: Data distribution used in Stage II training. The Stage I is pre-trained with 31K doses.
OAR
SpinalCord05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
RP std
3.02
3.49
2.54
2.93
4.04
3.38
2.96
3.21
ours std
1.18
1.78
1.09
1.27
1.82
1.22
1.78
1.27
RP mean
3.25
6.29
4.71
6.41
7.37
4.51
5.54
2.43
ours mean
1.69
2.94
2.06
2.01
4.13
1.92
2.92
1.18
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
PosteriorNeck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem 03
Trachea
better count
RP std
3.25
1.38
2.70
4.30
3.62
0.92
3.40
0
Table 2: Statistics of intra-patient differences of expected and achieved DVHs ( ↓ ). RP: RapidPlan Magliari et al. (2024) . ours: the predicted dose from FDP and objectives extracted from AI dose for Eclipse planning.
OAR
SpinalCord 05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
RP std
0.98
2.49
2.69
3.03
6.34
1.29
1.61
0.31
ours std
0.73
2.76
1.92
1.05
3.61
0.56
0.90
0.32
RP mean
0.43
4.24
2.02
2.22
6.00
1.66
2.25
0.23
ours mean
0.45
1.55
1.14
0.83
3.19
0.64
0.84
0.23
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem 03
Trachea
better count
RP std
7.12
0.14
5.70
3.76
3.73
1.76
6.51
3
Table 3: Statistics of inter-patient differences of expected and achieved DVHs ( ↓ ). RP: RapidPlan Magliari et al. (2024) . ours: the predicted dose from FDP and objectives extracted from AI dose for Eclipse planning.
Figure 2: Estimated vs. achieved DVHs of RapidPlan and our FDP model. RapidPlan estimations are not well aligned with achieved plans, may due to its limited generalization to unseen patients.
OAR
SpinalCor 05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
better
47.50
30.00
47.50
31.25
64.56
32.50
48.68
30.23
worse
5.00
21.43
0.00
1.25
1.27
6.25
5.26
4.65
similar
47.50
48.57
52.50
67.50
34.18
61.25
46.05
65.12
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem 03
Trachea
OAR count
better
59.57
0.00
71.11
12.50
56.16
7.50
51.16
14
worse
2.13
0.00
6.67
6.25
2.74
3.75
0.00
0
Table 4: Structure-wise plan quality comparison between RapidPlan and our FDP. Each structure is categorized as “better”, “worse”, or “similar”, indicating whether the plan generated by FDP shows improved, reduced, or comparable quality relative to RapidPlan. The “similar” thresholds are 1 Gray for OARs; 0.015 for PTV indices (HI and CI as defined in Sec. 2.1 ). Percentages (%) are reported for each category per structure, while the bold column presents the column counts.
Figure 3: Demonstration of user preference with sliding bars. The left/right of sliding bars represents better/worse quality for the specific structure respectively. The Preference 1 (P1) has the preferences of OAR sparing over PTV homogenity, and Preference 2 (P2) has the opposite. The preferences have been captured in the dose prediction, as shown in the DVHs in the right panel.
OAR
SpinalCord05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
P1 MeanDose
14.59
14.41
13.83
26.25
28.29
4.84
22.03
4.89
P2 MeanDose
16.33
15.47
13.44
27.25
28.04
5.24
23.4
5.55
P1 MaxDose
34.2
62.2
35.3
71.3
69.2
12.5
68.4
16.0
P2 MaxDose
38.3
63.3
36.6
71.5
69.7
15.5
68.8
18.7
OAR
CochleaL
CochleaR
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
PosteriorNeck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem03
Trachea
P1 MeanDose
6.28
1.92
4.13
10.01
26.04
19.82
4.64
9.8
Table 5: The achieved mean dose from Eclipse with different flavors based on Figure 3 .
Figure 5: Screenshot of the Gradio demo interface. A demo video recording can be found in an HuggingFace repo .
Figure 6: Screenshot of deliverable plan in Eclipse derived from our flexible dose proposer (FDP). The upper right shows the BEV of the patients with RT structures and Multi-Leaf Collimator overlaid. Other pannels show the achieved dose overlaid with CT.
Figure 7: The cartoon illustration about intra- and inter- patient differences.
OAR
SpinalCord 05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
RP std
3.92
2.90
3.15
2.91
4.21
3.25
3.09
3.85
ours std
1.63
1.71
1.26
1.49
2.15
1.06
1.21
1.63
RP mean
5.62
10.75
5.39
8.08
8.68
6.33
7.85
3.89
ours mean
2.57
4.33
1.78
1.99
3.31
1.92
1.90
1.69
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulder
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
Brain Stem 03
Trachea
better count
RP std
3.65
1.59
2.30
4.64
3.16
1.49
3.66
0
Table 9: Statistics of intra-patient differences of expected and achieved DVHs ( ↓ ).
OAR
SpinalCord 05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
RP std
2.41
4.44
2.76
2.72
5.28
2.20
2.61
0.57
ours std
1.92
2.52
2.25
0.93
3.62
1.08
1.05
0.54
RP mean
0.88
8.80
1.98
3.05
6.07
2.93
3.66
0.40
ours mean
0.79
4.69
1.41
0.86
2.91
0.92
1.10
0.42
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulder
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
Brain Stem 03
Trachea
better count
RP std
7.72
0.23
4.99
4.18
6.14
1.41
7.70
0
Table 10: Statistics of inter-patient differences of expected and achieved DVHs ( ↓ ).
OAR
SpinalCord 05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
better
36.36
17.65
37.66
10.39
50.00
10.39
13.70
21.95
worse
6.49
41.18
3.90
6.49
6.58
29.87
26.03
2.44
similar
57.14
41.18
58.44
83.12
43.42
59.74
60.27
75.61
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem 03
Trachea
OAR count
better
38.30
0.00
47.73
1.30
34.29
7.79
36.59
10
worse
23.40
0.00
20.45
10.39
11.43
3.90
0.00
4
Table 11: Quality per structure of achieved plans of RapidPlan and our FDP. “better”, “worse”, “similar” represent the plan derived from FDP has better, worse, or similar quality respectively. Percentages (%) are reported for each category per structure, while the bold column presents the column counts. If the percent of “better” is larger than “worse” of one structure, the “better” count will add 1.
OAR
SpinalCord05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
RP std
1.48
1.70
1.47
2.91
2.05
2.33
1.44
2.95
ours std
1.57
1.42
0.99
1.76
1.83
1.31
1.90
1.81
RP mean
1.83
4.32
4.53
5.28
4.61
4.95
3.54
2.58
ours mean
1.82
2.96
4.59
2.62
3.93
2.00
2.83
1.62
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem03
Trachea
better count
RP std
3.25
1.25
2.18
1.41
2.48
1.06
4.43
6
Table 12: Statistics of intra-patient differences of expected and achieved DVHs ( ↓ ).
OAR
SpinalCord05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
RP std
0.12
0.29
1.37
1.16
4.49
1.11
0.66
0.39
ours std
0.12
0.41
0.67
0.85
1.87
0.63
0.68
0.39
RP mean
0.38
4.23
4.93
2.80
9.90
2.61
2.59
0.38
ours mean
0.37
0.72
4.09
1.11
2.69
0.98
1.00
0.36
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
PosteriorNeck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem03
Trachea
better count
RP std
0.14
0.08
3.14
0.13
2.14
0.00
0.53
5
Table 13: Statistics of inter-patient differences of expected and achieved DVHs ( ↓ ).
OAR
SpinalCord 05
Larynx-PTV
Lips
Mandible-PTV
OCavity-PTV
ParotidCon-PTV
ParotidIps-PTV
Esophagus
better
25.00
0.00
50.00
75.00
75.00
25.00
50.00
50.00
worse
0.00
50.00
0.00
25.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
similar
75.00
50.00
50.00
0.00
25.00
75.00
50.00
50.00
OAR
SubmandL-PTV
Shoulders
SubmandR-PTV
Posterior Neck
PharConst-PTV
BrainStem03
Trachea
OAR count
better
50.00
0.00
66.67
0.00
100.00
0.00
75.00
10
worse
50.00
0.00
0.00
25.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
2
Table 14: Quality per structure of achieved plans of RapidPlan and our FDP. “better”, “worse”, “similar” represent the plan derived from FDP has better, worse, or similar quality respectively. Percentages (%) are reported for each category per structure, while the bold column presents the column counts. If the percent of “better” is larger than “worse” of one structure, the “better” count will add 1.
Figure 8: Illustration of translating 3D dose prediction to optimization objectives in Eclipse TPS.
Voxel-wise dose prediction is a critical yet challenging task in practical radiotherapy (RT) planning, as bespoke models trained from scratch often struggle to generalize across diverse clinical settings. Meanwhile, generative models trained on billion-scale datasets from vision domains have achieved impressive performance. Herein, we propose DiffKT3D, a unified Any2Any 3D diffusion framework that leverages prior knowledge from pretrained video diffusion models for efficient and clinically meaningful dose prediction. To enable flexible conditioning across multiple clinical modalities (CT, anatomical structures, body, beam settings, etc.), we introduce an Any2Any conditional paradigm utilizing modality-specific embeddings without cross-attention overhead. Further, we design a novel reinforcement learning (RL) post-training mechanism guided by a clinically-informed Scorecard explicitly tailored to institutional treatment preferences. Compared with winner of GDP-HMM challenge, DiffKT3D sets a new state-of-the-art in dose prediction by reducing voxel-level MAE from 2.07 to 1.93. In addition, DiffKT3D achieves superior image quality and preference match. These results demonstrate that transferring diffusion priors via modality-aware conditioning and clinically aligned RL post-training can provide a robust and generalizable solution for RT planning across various clinical scenarios.
Yuhan Wang, Zihan Li, Han Liu +7
1UC Santa Cruz · 2Siemens Healthineers · University of Washington
Radiotherapy (RT) planning is complex, subjective, and time-intensive. Advances with artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve its precision and efficiency, but progress is often limited by the scarcity of large, standardized datasets. To address this, we introduce the Automated Iterative RT Planning (AIRTP) system, a scalable solution for generating high-quality treatment plans. This scalable solution is designed to generate substantial volumes of consistently high-quality treatment plans, overcoming a key obstacle in the advancement of AI-driven RT planning. Our AIRTP pipeline adheres to clinical guidelines and automates essential steps, including organ-at-risk (OAR) contouring, helper structure creation, beam setup, optimization, and plan quality improvement, using AI integrated with RT planning software like Varian Eclipse. Furthermore, a novel approach for determining optimization parameters to reproduce 3D dose distributions, i.e. a method to convert dose predictions to deliverable treatment plans constrained by machine limitations is proposed. A comparative analysis of plan quality reveals that our automated pipeline produces treatment plans of quality comparable to those generated manually, which traditionally require several hours of labor per plan. Committed to public research, the first data release of our AIRTP pipeline includes nine cohorts covering head-and-neck and lung cancer sites to support an AAPM 2025 challenge. To our best knowledge, this dataset features more than 10 times number of plans compared to the largest existing well-curated public dataset. Repo: https://github.com/RiqiangGao/GDP-HMM_AAPMChallenge.
Riqiang Gao, Mamadou Diallo, Han Liu +10
Digital Technology and Innovation, Siemens Healthineers · 2Varian Medical Systems, Siemens Healthineers · 3UCSD +2
Automating prostate radiotherapy treatment planning is dosimetrically complex, particularly for extreme hypofractionated regimens. In this study, we introduce Dose-PlanNet, a physics-guided 3D deep learning architecture designed to predict dose distributions. This model's performance was evaluated on a cohort of patients treated in a prospective trial where two different dose fractionation regimens were employed. Dose-PlanNet achieved comparable target coverage (D95), though statistical analysis revealed a marginal reduction in target homogeneity (p<0.001) offset. However the model achieved statistically significant improvements in high-dose organ-at-risk sparing (p<0.001). When evaluated against strict Prospective Randomized protocol volumetric constraints, automated plans met prespecified clinical acceptance criteria in 11 out of 14 Moderate Hypofraction Arm plans and 9 out of 12 Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy Arm plans. This pipeline demonstrates that physics-informed deep learning can accelerate radiotherapy workflows while safely maintaining the stringent dosimetric quality required for high-precision clinical deployment.