Combining dense elements with attention mechanisms for 3D radiotherapy dose prediction on head and neck cancers.

The proposed method achieved similar performance on both realistic in-house data and public data compared to the attention U-net with a DVH loss, and outperformed other methods such as HD U-net and HDA U-net with standard MSE losses. The use of the DVH objective for training showed consistent improvements to the baselines on most metrics, supporting its added benefit in H&N cancer cases. The quick prediction time of the proposed method allows for real-time applications, providing physicians a method to generate an objective end goal for the dosimetrist to use as reference for planning. This could considerably reduce the number of iterations between the two expert physicians thus reducing the overall treatment planning time.