Multicriteria Optimization in Intensity Modulated Rediotherapy Planning

Inverse treatment planning of intensity modulated radiothrapy is a multicriteria optimization problem: planners have to find optimal compromises between a sufficiently high dose in tumor tissue that garantuee a high tumor control, and, dangerous overdosing of critical structures, in order to avoid high normal tissue complcication problems. The approach presented in this work demonstrates how to state a flexible generic multicriteria model of the IMRT planning problem and how to produce clinically highly relevant Pareto-solutions. The model is imbedded in a principal concept of Reverse Engineering, a general optimization paradigm for design problems. Relevant parts of the Pareto-set are approximated by using extreme compromises as cornerstone solutions, a concept that is always feasible if box constraints for objective funtions are available. A major practical drawback of generic multicriteria concepts trying to compute or approximate parts of the Pareto-set is the high computational effort. This problem can be overcome by exploitation of an inherent asymmetry of the IMRT planning problem and an adaptive approximation scheme for optimal solutions based on an adaptive clustering preprocessing technique. Finally, a coherent approach for calculating and selecting solutions in a real-timeinteractive decision-making process is presented. The paper is concluded with clinical examples and a discussion of ongoing research topics.