RESUMO
OBJECTIVE@#To study the feasibility and potential benefits of beam angle optimization (BAO) to automated planning in liver cancer.@*METHODS@#An approach of beam angle sampling is proposed to implement BAO along with the module Auto-planning in treatment planning system (TPS) Pinnacle. An in-house developed plan quality metric (PQM) is taken as the preferred evaluating method during the sampling. The process is driven automatically by in-house made Pinnacle scripts both in sampling and scoring. In addition, dosimetry analysis and physician's opinion are also performed as the supplementary and compared with the result of PQM.@*RESULTS@#It is revealed by the numerical analysis of PQM scores that only 15% patients whose superior trials evaluated by PQM are also the initial trials. Gantry optimization can bring benefit to plan quality along with auto-planning in liver cancer. Similar results are provided by both dose comparison and physician's opinion.@*CONCLUSIONS@#It is possible to introduce a full automated approach of beam angle optimization to automated planning process. The advantages of this procedure can be observed both in numerical analysis and physician's opinion.