Understanding the PULSAR effect in combined radiotherapy and immunotherapy using transformer-based attention mechanisms

PULSAR (personalized, ultra-fractionated stereotactic adaptive radiotherapy) is the adaptation of stereotactic ablative radiotherapy towards personalized cancer management. It has potential to harness the synergy between radiation therapy and immunotherapy, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors to amplify the anti-tumor immune response. For the first time, we applied a transformer-based attention mechanism to investigate the underlying …