Challenges of radiotherapy: Report on the 4D treatment planning workshop 2013

This report, compiled by experts on the treatment of mobile targets with advanced radiotherapy, summarizes the main conclusions and innovations achieved during the 4D treatment planning workshop 2013. This annual workshop focuses on research aiming to advance 4D radiotherapy treatments, including all critical aspects of time resolved delivery, such as in-room imaging, motion detection, motion managing, beam application, and quality assurance techniques. The report aims to revise achievements in the field and to discuss remaining challenges and potential solutions. As main achievements advances in the development of a standardized 4D phantom and in the area of 4D-treatment plan optimization were identified. Furthermore, it was noticed that MR imaging gains importance and high interest for sequential 4DCT/MR data sets was expressed, which represents a general trend of the field towards data covering a longer time period of motion. A new point of attention was work related to dose reconstructions, which may play a major role in verification of 4D treatment deliveries. The experimental validation of results achieved by 4D treatment planning and the systematic evaluation of different deformable image registration methods especially for inter-modality fusions were identified as major remaining challenges. A challenge that was also suggested as focus for future 4D workshops was the adaptation of image guidance approaches from conventional radiotherapy into particle therapy. Besides summarizing the last workshop, the authors also want to point out new evolving demands and give an outlook on the focus of the next workshop.