Transformer-Integrated Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network for Dose Prediction in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Radiotherapy.

Radiotherapy is recognized as the major treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Rapid and accurate dose prediction can improve the efficiency of the treatment planning process and the quality of radiotherapy plans. Currently, deep learning-based methods have been widely applied to dose prediction for...

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Published in:Journal of Imaging Informatics in Medicine Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 1531 - 1552
Main Authors: Li, Xiangchen, Liu, Yanhua, Zhao, Feixiang, Yang, Feng, Luo, Wang
Format: equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Springer Nature Jun2025
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jun2025
      vid: 38
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      pub: Springer Nature
      place: New York, New York
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        185280533
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        10.1007/s10278-024-01296-3
        185280533
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        atl: Transformer-Integrated Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network for Dose Prediction in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Radiotherapy.
      aug:
        au:
          Li, Xiangchen
          Liu, Yanhua
          Zhao, Feixiang
          Yang, Feng
          Luo, Wang
        affil: https://ror.org/05pejbw21 College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Chengdu University of Technology, 610059, Chengdu, China
      sug:
        subj:
          Convolutional Neural Networks Methods
          Radiotherapy, Computer-Assisted
          Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Radiotherapy
          Radiation Dosage Evaluation
          Prediction Models
          Human
          Funding Source
          Deep Learning
          Descriptive Statistics
          Experimental Studies
      ab: Radiotherapy is recognized as the major treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Rapid and accurate dose prediction can improve the efficiency of the treatment planning process and the quality of radiotherapy plans. Currently, deep learning-based methods have been widely applied to dose prediction for radiotherapy treatment planning. However, it is important to note that existing models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) often overlook long-distance information. Although some studies try to use Transformer to solve the problem, it lacks the ability of CNN to process the spatial information inherent in images. Therefore, we propose a novel CNN and Transformer hybrid dose prediction model. To enhance the transmission ability of features between CNN and Transformer, we design a hierarchical dense recurrent encoder with a channel attention mechanism. Additionally, we propose a progressive decoder that preserves richer texture information through layer-wise reconstruction of high-dimensional feature maps. The proposed model also introduces object-driven skip connections, which facilitate the flow of information between the encoder and decoder. Experiments are conducted on in-house datasets, and the results show that the proposed model is superior to baseline methods in most dosimetric criteria. In addition, the image analysis metrics including PSNR, SSIM, and NRMSE demonstrate that the proposed model is consistent with ground truth and produces promising visual effects compared to other advanced methods. The proposed method could be taken as a powerful clinical guidance tool for physicists, significantly enhancing the efficiency of radiotherapy planning. The source code is available at https://github.com/CDUTJ102/THCN-Net.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        equations & formulas
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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