An Approach for Treatment Programming in Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT)

Abstract

Intensity modulated radiation therapy is one of the most commonly procedures used for delivering radiation to cancerous tissues. It aims to deliver the prescribed dose in the target volume while minimizing damage to the nearby healthy organs. In this procedure, two decisions being very important are selecting the beam angles and calculating the beam intensities. Although beam angle selection (beam angle optimization) is one of the most important decisions in this procedure, it is often be made manually and based on radio therapist experience and intuition. In order to overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a hybrid approach for automated beam angle selection and intensity computation. The proposed approach first finds a good feasible solution, and then use this solution as a starting point in local neighborhood search to find the local optimal solution. As the results of numerical experiments demonstrate, the proposed hybrid-approach, compared to its corresponding stand-alone methods, finds a better solution quickly and consistently.