A Case-Based Reasoning Approach to Dose Planning in Radiotherapy

This paper concerns the determination of dose plan for prostate cancer in radiotherapy. The determination of dose plan is based on the analysis of trade-off between the expected benefits in terms of the cancer control and the risk in terms of the side effects to rectum caused by the given radiation. A casebased reasoning (CBR) approach to dose planning is proposed, in which fuzzy sets theory is applied in the similarity measure. Dempster-Shafer theory is applied to fuse the dose plans from multiple retrieved similar cases with the aim to strength the agreements and decrease the conflicts in the situations in which oncologists might have different opinions of the same case. Some initial results are presented towards the validation of the approach.