A physics-informed, plug-and-play dose engine for gradient-based radiotherapy treatment planning
About
Radiotherapy treatment planning remains a time-intensive iterative process requiring expert intervention in commercial treatment planning system (TPS). While machine learning approaches have demonstrated promise, most remain depedent on TPS-based dose calculation or surrogate dose models, preventing direct optimization of deliverable treatment plan parameters. We propose PyDoseRT (PDRT), a physics-informed, GPU-accelerated dose engine implemented in PyTorch that computes dose distributions directly from treatment delivery parameters (i.e., MLC leaf positions, jaw positions, gantry angles, and monitor units). The engine preserves gradient information throughout the dose computation pipeline, enabling gradient-based optimization of hardware-constrained treatment plans without the reliance on a commercial TPS. PDRT was evaluated on 19 and 162 clinical VMAT prostate cancer plans from two hospitals (with different treatment machines). When recalculating clinical plans, PDRT achieved high 3D gamma pass rates (mean 96.8% for 2%/2 mm and 98.9% for 3%/3 mm, depending on cohort). All optimized plans converged to clinically acceptable solutions and passed deliverability verification when imported into a commercial TPS. This physics-informed framework eliminates TPS dependency for radiotherapy optimization research by enabling gradient-based planning while ensuring that delivery parameters remain in the machine-feasible range. The gradient-enabled dose engine allows exploration of novel optimization strategies and objective functions while maintaining clinical validity. The proposed approach provides a research platform for investigating real-time adaptive radiotherapy concepts, automated planning workflows, and TPS-independent optimization strategies, and democratizing radiotherapy research, by exposing gradient-enabled, hardware-aware, open-source dose computation.