Purpose: Development of a novel interactive visualization approach for the exploration of radiotherapy treatment plans with a focus on overlap volumes with the aim of healthy tissue sparing. Methods: We propose a visualization approach to include overlap volumes in the radiotherapy treatment plan evaluation process. Quantitative properties can be interactively explored to identify critical regions and used to steer the visualization for a detailed inspection of candidates. We evaluated our approach with a user study covering the individual visualizations and their interactions regarding helpfulness, comprehensibility, intuitiveness, decision-making and speed. Results: A user study with three domain experts was conducted using our software and evaluating five data sets each representing a different type of cancer and location by performing a set of tasks and filling out a questionnaire. The results show that the visualizations and interactions help to identify and evaluate overlap volumes according to their physical and dose properties. Furthermore, the task of finding dose hot spots can also benefit from our approach. Conclusions: The results indicate the potential to enhance the current treatment plan evaluation process in terms of healthy tissue sparing.

翻译：目的：开发一种新颖的交互式可视化方法，用于探索放疗治疗计划中重叠体积，以实现健康组织保护。方法：我们提出一种将重叠体积纳入放疗治疗计划评估过程的可视化方法。通过交互式探索定量属性，可识别关键区域，并用于引导可视化以对候选区域进行详细检查。我们通过一项用户研究评估了该方法，涵盖各个可视化及其交互在有用性、可理解性、直观性、决策制定和速度方面的表现。结果：使用我们的软件，对三名领域专家进行了一项用户研究，通过执行一组任务并填写问卷，评估了五个数据集，每个数据集代表不同类型的癌症及其位置。结果表明，可视化及其交互有助于根据物理和剂量属性识别和评估重叠体积。此外，寻找剂量热点任务也可从我们的方法中受益。结论：研究结果表明，该方法在健康组织保护方面具有增强当前治疗计划评估过程的潜力。