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AI-Driven Advanced Radiotherapy: Towards Personalized, Predictive and Adaptive Cancer Treatment

A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Methods and Technologies Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 689

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Interests: treatment planning; low dose imaging; Monte Carlo simulation; deep learning applications in radiotherapy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Kansas Cancer Center, Kansas City, KS 66160, USA
Interests: artificial Intelligence&machine learning; Radiomics; FLASH-RT; adaptive RT; novel beam delivery treatment; outcome prediction

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has emerged as a transformative paradigm in healthcare and precision medicine by enabling computational models that represent key aspects of patient health. By incorporating data-driven AI and ML methods, these models can learn from multimodal patient data, enabling adaptive modeling, real-time monitoring, outcome prediction, and personalized clinical decision support.

This Special Issue aims to highlight the rapidly evolving applications of AI-driven technologies in radiotherapy, showcasing how these innovations can revolutionize cancer care. We welcome original research articles, reviews, and clinical studies that present novel AI and ML applications in areas such as adaptive radiotherapy, personalized outcome prediction, radiobiological response modeling, and clinical decision support. We are particularly interested in contributions that demonstrate how AI approaches can enhance clinical workflows, treatment precision, and patient outcomes, ultimately improving quality of life.

Building on AI- and machine learning-driven approaches, potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  1. Adaptive Radiotherapy
    1. Personalization of dose regimens.
    2. Adaptive treatment planning.
    3. Plan robustness analysis and uncertainty quantification.
  2. Outcome Prediction
    1. Predicting toxicity and tumor control probability.
    2. Modeling of immune response.
  3. Radiobiological Response Modeling
    1. Multi-scale biological modeling across molecular to organ levels.
    2. Simulation of tumor–immune microenvironment dynamics.
  4. Patient Motion and Organ Dynamics
    1. Real-time organ motion prediction and compensation.
    2. Modeling of inter- and intra-fraction anatomical deformation.
  5. Clinical Workflow and Decision Support
    1. AI-assisted selection of treatment strategies.
    2. Simulation of treatment pathways and clinical workflows.
  6. AI for QA and Commissioning
    1. Virtual patient models for end-to-end QA.
    2. Predictive machine and delivery system modeling for commissioning.
  7. Emerging Frontiers
    1. Radiopharmaceutical innovations.
    2. Population-level modeling for in silico clinical trials.

We eagerly anticipate your contributions that showcase the innovative applications of AI-driven approaches in advancing cancer radiotherapy.

Dr. Zhen Tian
Dr. Chaoqiong Ma
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • radiotherapy
  • artificial intelligence
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • outcome prediction
  • treatment planning
  • adaptive RT
  • personalized RT
  • radiomics

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

23 pages, 3709 KB  
Article
Dedicated Breast PET-Based Deep Learning Radiomics for Prediction of Pathologic Complete Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in HER2-Positive Breast Cancer
by Tianhao Zeng, Yilin He, Teng Zhang, Caiyue Ren, Jun Xu, Jingyi Cheng and Wenlong Ming
Cancers 2026, 18(10), 1581; https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers18101581 - 13 May 2026
Viewed by 351
Abstract
Objectives: To exploratorily evaluate the potential of baseline dedicated breast PET (D-PET) for noninvasive prediction of pathological complete response (pCR) to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in HER2-positive (HER2+) breast cancer, and to investigate a fusion strategy integrating conventional radiomics and deep learning features. Methods: [...] Read more.
Objectives: To exploratorily evaluate the potential of baseline dedicated breast PET (D-PET) for noninvasive prediction of pathological complete response (pCR) to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in HER2-positive (HER2+) breast cancer, and to investigate a fusion strategy integrating conventional radiomics and deep learning features. Methods: We developed a multi-representation framework with radiomics based on data-driven high-/low-uptake metabolic subregions and deep learning trained on standardized 3D tumor volumes, and intratumoral heterogeneity (ITH) was quantified on the largest slice as an additional comparator. The outputs of these pathways were subsequently integrated through feature-level and decision-level fusion. Model performance was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), and interpretability analyses were applied to identify image regions and features contributing to predictions. Results: In a HER2-positive breast cancer cohort (n = 147) with baseline D-PET, deep learning (3D ResNet, AUC = 0.79) and radiomics (logistic regression, AUC = 0.78) achieved comparable performance on the primary test set, whereas the ITH model showed limited value (AUC = 0.61). Fusion further improved discrimination on test set 1, with an AUC of 0.83 for decision-level fusion and 0.84 for feature-level fusion. On test set 2, decision-level fusion achieved the highest AUC (0.84), and feature-level fusion maintained stable performance (AUC = 0.80). Conclusions: In this exploratory study, baseline D-PET showed promising performance for noninvasive prediction of NAC response in HER2+ breast cancer. The fusion of deep learning and radiomics yielded improvements over single-representation models, highlighting the potential role of D-PET models as decision-support tools. Full article
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