Otimização multicritério dos problemas de ângulos de feixe e mapa de fluência para tratamentos radioterápicos IMRT

Abstract

Cancer is a disease that affects thousands of people in the whole world, and every year the number of people diagnosed with some form of cancer grows. Several treatments have been developed for the most diverse types of cancer, from surgeries, treatments with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the latter being the object of study of this work. The use of radiotherapy in treatments for people with cancer has been growing and successfully applied since it allows less invasive approach and more accurate due to current technologies. The radiotherapy modality that uses external radiation sources, also known as teletherapy, there are factors that can benefit from computational technologies to generate an improvement in the quality of the treatment performed. In particular, three computational problems can be solved in the planning stage of the teletherapy treatments: the selection of the angles of the radiation beams, the determination of the amount of radiation that each beam should emit, and the sequencing of the radiation that must be administered to the patient. The first two problems, also known as Beam Angle Optimization and Fluency Map Optimization, are studied in this paper. Algorithms, mono-objective and multiobjective, besides linear and quadratic programming models were developed to solve the problems already mentioned. The algorithms were tested in a set of real cases of liver and prostate cancer and their performances are reported with respect to the computational time spent and the quality of the solutions found.