Radiotherapy Treatment Planning With Dose Volume Constraints By Linear Programming Approach

Abstract

Optimization has become an important tool in treatment planning for cancer radiation therapy.  It may be used to determine beam weights, beam directions, and appropriate use of beam modifiers such as wedges and blocks, with the aim of delivering a required dose to the tumor while sparing nearby critical structures and normal tissue. Linear programming formulations are a core computation in many approaches to treatment planning, because of the abundance of highly developed linear programming software. Moreover the choices of formulation, algorithm, and pivot rule that perform best from a computational view point are sometimes not obvious, and the software’s default choices are sometimes poor.  Here we present some linear programming formulations of treatment planning problem with dose volume constraints, conclusions are drawn about the formulations and variants.