An approach for treatment planning in intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT)

Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy is one of the most commonly used procedures of delivering radiation to cancerous tissues, with the aim of reaching the prescripted dose in the target volume while minimizing damage to nearby healthy organs. Two decisions are of fundamental importance: to select the beam angles and calculate the beam intensities. Beam Angle selection (Beam Angle Optimization) is an important problem and most of the time, beam angles are manually selecteld based on human experience and intuition. In this study, we propose a hybrid approach for automated beam angle selection and computing beam intensities, that aims to find good feasible solutions quickly and then used the solution as a starting point for Local Neighborhood Search to find local optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrated that hybrid approaches in comparison with their corresponding stand-alone methods, quickly and consistently find good local optimal solutions.