Abstract
It has become common practice in radiotherapy treatment planning to equate and confuse the terms “conformal treatment planning” or “inverse treatment planning” with “optimized treatment planning.” Indeed, the term “optimized treatment planning” implies that the treatment planning team of dosimetrists, physicists, and radiation oncologists actually knows a priori what the optimal treatment plan for a particular patient really is, and that the computer can derive such a plan if given a set of design specifications. The paper by Wu et al. questions this notion, and in particular, points out that virtually all inverse treatment planning systems erroneously imply that treatment plans are optimized by dint of the fact that a certain arbitrary score or objective function defined by the treatment planner has been minimized. These score functions are usually defined by dose-volume constraints for the planning target volume and surrounding normal tissues plus penalty values for not meeting these constraints.
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