Optimal unified combination rule in application of Dempster-Shafer theory to lung cancer radiotherapy dose response outcome analysis.

Our previous study demonstrated the application of the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to dose/volume/outcome data analysis. Specifically, it provided Yager's rule to fuse data from different institutions pertaining to radiotherapy pneumonitis versus mean lung dose. The present work is a follow-on study that employs the optimal unified combination rule, which optimizes data similarity among independent sources. Specifically, we construct belief and plausibility functions on the lung cancer radiotherapy dose outcome datasets, and then apply the optimal unified combination rule to obtain combined belief and plausibility, which bound the probabilities of pneumonitis incidence. To estimate the incidence of pneumonitis at any value of mean lung dose, we use the Lyman-Kutcher-Burman (LKB) model to fit the combined belief and plausibility curves. The results show that the optimal unified combination rule yields a narrower uncertainty range (as represented by the belief-plausibility range) than Yager's rule, which is also theoretically proven.