Purpose

Lung stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy (SABR) is a radiation therapy success story with level 1 evidence demonstrating its efficacy. To provide real-time respiratory motion management for lung SABR, several commercial and preclinical markerless lung target tracking (MLTT) approaches have been developed. However, these approaches have yet to be benchmarked using a common measurement methodology. This knowledge gap motivated the MArkerless lung target Tracking CHallenge (MATCH). The aim was to localize lung targets accurately and precisely in a retrospective in-silico study and a prospective experimental study.

Methods

MATCH was an American Association of Physicists in Medicine sponsored Grand Challenge. Common materials for the in-silico and experimental studies were the experiment setup including an anthropomorphic thorax phantom with two targets within the lungs, and a lung SABR planning protocol. The phantom was moved rigidly with patient-measured lung target motion traces, which also acted as ground truth motion. In the retrospective in-silico study a volumetric modulated arc therapy treatment was simulated and a dataset consisting of treatment planning data and intra-treatment kV- and MV-images for four blinded lung motion traces was provided to the participants. The participants used their MLTT approach to localize the moving target based on the dataset. In the experimental study the participants received the phantom experiment setup and five patient-measured lung motion traces. The participants used their MLTT approach to localize the moving target during an experimental SABR phantom treatment. The challenge was open to any participant, and participants could complete either one or both parts of the challenge. For both the in-silico and experimental studies the MLTT results were analyzed and ranked using the prospectively-defined metric of the percentage of the tracked target position being within 2 mm of the ground truth.

Results

A total of 30 institutions registered and 15 result submissions were received, four for the in-silico study and eleven for the experimental study. The participating MLTT approaches were: Accuray CyberKnife (2), Accuray Radixact (2), BrainLab Vero, C-RAD and preclinical MLTT (5) on a conventional linear accelerator (Varian TrueBeam). For the in-silico study the percentage of the 3D tracking error within 2 mm ranged from 50% to 92%. For the experimental study, the percentage of the 3D tracking error within 2 mm ranged from 39% to 96%.

Conclusions

A common methodology for measuring the accuracy of MLTT approaches has been developed and used to benchmark preclinical and commercial approaches retrospectively and prospectively. Several MLTT approaches were able to track the target with sub-millimeter accuracy and precision. The study outcome paves the way for broader clinical implementation of MLTT. MATCH is live, with datasets and analysis software being available online at https://www.aapm.org/GrandChallenge/MATCH/ to support future research.

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