Balancing control and simplicity: A variable aggregation method in intensity modulated radiation therapy planning.

It is commonly believed that not all degrees of freedom are needed to produce good solutions for the treatment planning problem in intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). However, typical methods to exploit this fact either increase the complexity of the optimization problem or are heuristic in nature. In this work we introduce a technique based on adaptively refining variable clusters to successively attain better treatment plans.

Pareto navigation: algorithmic foundation of interactive multi-criteria IMRT planning.

Inherently, IMRT treatment planning involves compromising between different planning goals. Multi-criteria IMRT planning directly addresses this compromising and thus makes it more systematic. Usually, several plans are computed from which the planner selects the most promising following a certain procedure.

Improved stratification algorithms for step-and-shoot MLC delivery in intensity-modulated radiation therapy.

In inverse planning for intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), the fluence distribution of each treatment beam is usually calculated in an optimization process. The delivery of the resulting treatment plan using multileaf collimators (MLCs) is performed either in the step-and-shoot or sliding window technique. For step-and-shoot delivery, the arbitrary beam fluence distributions have to be transformed into an applicable sequence of subsegments.