STereotactic Arrhythmia Radioablation (STAR) showed promising results in patients with refractory ventricular tachycardia (VT). However, clinical data is scarce and heterogeneous. The STOPSTORM.eu consortium was established to investigate and harmonize STAR in Europe. The primary goal of this benchmark study was to investigate current treatment planning practice within the STOPSTORM project as a baseline for future harmonization.
Planning target volumes (PTV) overlapping extra-cardiac organs-at-risk and/or cardiac substructures were generated for three STAR cases. Participating centers were asked to create single fraction treatment plans with 25 Gy dose prescription based on in-house clinical practice. All treatment plans were reviewed by an expert panel and quantitative crowd knowledge-based analysis was performed with independent software using descriptive statistics for ICRU report 91 relevant parameters and crowd dose-volume-histograms. Thereafter, treatment planning consensus statements were established using a dual-stage voting process.
Twenty centers submitted 67 treatment plans for this study. In most plans (75%) Intensity Modulated Arc Therapy (IMAT) with 6 MV flattening-filter-free beams was used. Dose prescription was mainly based on PTV D _95% (49%) or D _96-100% (19%). Many participants preferred to spare close extra-cardiac organs-at-risk (75%) and cardiac substructures (50%) by PTV coverage reduction. PTV D _0.035cm3 ranged 25.5-34.6 Gy, demonstrating a large variety of dose inhomogeneity. Estimated treatment times without motion compensation or setup ranged 2-80 minutes. For the consensus statements, strong agreement was reached for beam technique planning, dose calculation, prescription methods and trade-offs between target and extra-cardiac critical structures. No agreement was reached on cardiac substructure dose limitations and on desired dose inhomogeneity in the target.
This STOPSTORM multi-center treatment planning benchmark study showed strong agreement on several aspects of STAR treatment planning, but also revealed disagreement on others. To standardize and harmonize STAR in the future, consensus statements were established, however clinical data is urgently needed for actionable guidelines for treatment planning.