Is accurate contouring of salivary and swallowing structures necessary to spare them in head and neck VMAT plans?

摘要

Background and purpose: Current standards for organ-at-risk (OAR) contouring encourage anatomical accuracy which can be resource intensive. Certain OARs may be suitable for alternative delineation strategies. We investigated whether simplified salivary and swallowing structure contouring can still lead to good OAR sparing in automated head and neck cancer (HNC) plans.