Simultaneous navigation of multiple Pareto surfaces, with an application to multicriteria IMRT planning with multiple beam angle configurations.

Purpose: To introduce a method to simultaneously explore a collection of Pareto surfaces. The method will allow radiotherapy treatment planners to interactively explore treatment plans for different beam angle configurations as well as different treatment modalities.

Methods: The authors assume a convex optimization setting and represent the Pareto surface for each modality or given beam set by a set of discrete points on the surface.

A new concept for interactive radiotherapy planning with multicriteria optimization: first clinical evaluation.

Background And Purpose: Currently, inverse planning for intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) can be a time-consuming trial and error process. This is because many planning objectives are inherently contradictory and cannot reach their individual optimum all at the same time. Therefore in clinical practice the potential of IMRT cannot be fully exploited for all patients.

IMRT planning on adaptive volume structures--a decisive reduction in computational complexity.

The objective of radiotherapy planning is to find a compromise between the contradictive goals of delivering a sufficiently high dose to the target volume while widely sparing critical structures. The search for such a compromise requires the computation of several plans, which mathematically means solving several optimization problems. In the case of intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) these problems are large-scale, hence the accumulated computational expense is very high.