Radiation therapy (RT) treatment planning systems (TPS) are commercially available for routine treatment planning for hospitals. However, cutting edge techniques constantly arise that are not immediately available or reflected in these TPSs. To this end, an TPS is required for experimental purposes that ideally can work in unison with the commercal TPSs. The External Beam Planning (EBP) module allows creating treatment plans by manually adding and setting up beams. However, this forward planning approach only serves basic evaluation scenarios, while another approach is needed for more complex beam configurations and treatment options: inverse planning.

Instead of defining the beams in a bottom-up fashion, inverse planning works from the top down by defining the goals and constraints. An optimizer algorithm starts investigating the space of possible beam configurations, and finds the best one in an iterative process. This project involves adding user and developer interface for inverse planning. Its evaluation will happen using an existing use case and optimizer.

Mentors: Prof. Gabor Fichtinger, Csaba Pinter

info: www.cs.queensu.ca/~gabor, email: gabor@cs.queensu.ca