{"doi":"10.1002/mp.16231","title":"Sub‐second photon dose prediction via transformer neural networks","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Fast dose calculation is critical for online and real-time adaptive therapy workflows. While modern physics-based dose algorithms must compromise accuracy to achieve low computation times, deep learning models can potentially perform dose prediction tasks with both high fidelity and speed. PURPOSE: We present a deep learning algorithm that, exploiting synergies between transformer and convolutional layers, accurately predicts broad photon beam dose distributions in few milliseconds. METHODS: The proposed improved Dose Transformer Algorithm (iDoTA) maps arbitrary patient geometries and beam information (in the form of a 3D projected shape resulting from a simple ray tracing calculation) to their corresponding 3D dose distribution. Treating the 3D CT input and dose output volumes as a sequence of 2D slices along the direction of the photon beam, iDoTA solves the dose prediction task as sequence modeling. The proposed model combines a Transformer backbone routing long-range information between all elements in the sequence, with a series of 3D convolutions extracting local features of the data. We train iDoTA on a dataset of 1700 beam dose distributions, using 11 clinical volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) plans (from prostate, lung, and head and neck cancer patients with 194-354 beams per plan) to assess its accuracy and speed. RESULTS: (2 mm, 2%) pass rate and an average relative dose error of 0.75 ± 0.36%. CONCLUSIONS: Offering the millisecond speed prediction per beam angle needed in online and real-time adaptive treatments, iDoTA represents a new state of the art in data-driven photon dose calculation. The proposed model can massively speed-up current photon workflows, reducing calculation times from few minutes to just a few seconds.","journal":"Medical Physics","year":2023,"id":334254,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":21,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9437,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1062659,"name":"Peng Dong","orcid":"0000-0002-4801-1986","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":252220,"name":"Charles Huang","orcid":"0000-0001-7559-8316","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":258394,"name":"Lei Xing","orcid":"0000-0003-2536-5359","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1062660,"name":"Zoltán Perkó","orcid":"0000-0002-0975-4226","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1062658,"name":"Oscar Pastor‐Serrano","orcid":"0000-0002-2328-1429","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:09:48.843291Z","pmid":"36669122","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}