A Novel Classification Method for Prediction of Rectal Bleeding in Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy Based on a Semi-Nonnegative ICA of 3D Planned Dose Distributions

The understanding of dose/side-effects relationships in prostate cancer radiotherapy is crucial to define appropriate individual's constraints for the therapy planning. Most of the existing methods to predict side-effects do not fully exploit the rich spatial information conveyed by the three-dimensional planned dose distributions. We propose a new classification method for three-dimensional individuals’ doses, based on a new semi-nonnegative ICA algorithm to identify patients at risk of presenting rectal bleeding from a population treated for prostate cancer. The method first determines two bases of vectors from the population data: the two bases span vector subspaces, which characterize patients with and without rectal bleeding, respectively. The classification is then achieved by calculating the distance of a given patient to the two subspaces. The results, obtained on a cohort of 87 patients (at two year follow-up) treated with radiotherapy, showed high performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity.