SU‐F‐BRD‐08: Guaranteed Epsilon‐Optimal Treatment Plans with Minimum Number of Beams for SBRT Using RayStation

Abstract

Purpose:To efficiently find quality‐guaranteed treatment plans with the minimum number of beams for stereotactic body radiation therapy using RayStation.Methods:For a pre‐specified pool of candidate beams we use RayStation (a treatment planning software for clinical use) to identify the deliverable plan which uses all the beams with the minimum dose to organs at risk (OARs) and dose to the tumor and other structures in specified ranges. Then use the dose matrix information for the generated apertures from RayStation to solve a linear program to find the ideal plan with the same objective and constraints allowing use of all beams. Finally we solve a mixed integer programming formulation of the beam angle optimization problem (BAO) with the objective of minimizing the number of beams while remaining in a predetermined epsilon‐optimality of the ideal plan with respect to the dose to OARs. Since the treatment plan optimization is a multicriteria optimization problem, the planner can exploit the multicriteria optimization capability of RayStation to navigate the ideal dose distribution Pareto surface and select a plan of desired target coverage versus OARs sparing, and then use the proposed technique to reduce the number of beams while guaranteeing quality. For the numerical experiments two liver cases and one lung case with 33 non‐coplanar beams are considered.Results:The ideal plan uses an impractically large number of beams. The proposed technique reduces the number of beams to the range of practical application (5 to 9 beams) while remaining in the epsilon‐optimal range of 1% to 5% optimality gap.Conclusion:The proposed method can be integrated into a general algorithm for fast navigation of the ideal dose distribution Pareto surface and finding the treatment plan with the minimum number of beams, which corresponds to the delivery time, in epsilon‐optimality range of the desired ideal plan.The project was supported by the Federal Share of program income earned by Massachusetts General Hospital on C06 CA059267, Proton Therapy Research and Treatment Center and partially by RaySearch Laboratories.