Radiation therapy is a non-invasive treatment modality for cancer patients. Radiation therapy treatment planning for cancer patients provides many challenging optimization problems. Various variables of a treatment plan need to be optimized so that the resulting plan can kill all cancerous cells while minimizing damage on the patient’s normal tissues. Intensity modulated proton therapy (IMPT) h...

Background: Three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) techniques are used for the treatment of patients with laryngeal cancer. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the effects of these 2 treatment techniques on the planning target volume (PTV) (laryngeal cancer), dose homogeneity, dose of organs at...

Multileaf collimators (MLCs) are the prevailing tool for the realization of radiation fields in intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). One step in the treatment planning is to determine a set of leaf positions realizing a certain intensity modulated radiation field. In this paper we suggest two extensions in the use of the MLC that lead to considerable savings in terms of monitor units, ...

Homogeneous target dose distribution in intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for sinonasal cancer (SNC) is challenging to achieve. To solve this problem, we established and evaluated a basal-dose-compensation (BDC) optimization approach, in which the treatment plan is further optimized based on the initial plans. Generally acceptable initial IMRT plans for thirteen patients were created and ...

Aperture-based inverse planning (ABIP) for intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatment planning starts with external radiation fields (beams) that fully conform to the target(s) and then superimposes sub-fields called segments to achieve complex shaping of 3D dose distributions. The segments’ intensities are determined by solving a feasibility problem. The least-intensity feasible (L...