Radiosurgery Treatment Planning via Nonlinear Programming

Michael Ferris (), Jinho Lim () and David Shepard ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2003, vol. 119, issue 1, 247-260

Abstract: The Gamma Knife is a highly specialized treatment unit that provides an advanced stereotactic approach to the treatment of tumors, vascular malformations, and pain disorders within the head. Inside a shielded treatment unit, multiple beams of radiation are focussed into an approximately spherical volume, generating a high dose shot of radiation. The treatment planning process attempts to cover the tumor with sufficient dosage without overdosing normal tissue or surrounding sensitive structures. An optimization problem is formulated that determines where to center the shots, for how long to expose each shot on the target, and what size focussing helmets should be used. We outline a new approach that models the dose distribution nonlinearly, and uses a smoothing approach to treat discrete problem choices. The resulting nonlinear program is not convex and several heuristic approaches are used to improve solution time and quality. The overall approach is fast and reliable; we give several results obtained from use in a clinical setting. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1022951027498 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:119:y:2003:i:1:p:247-260:10.1023/a:1022951027498

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1023/A:1022951027498

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().