Treatment plan optimisation in conformal radiotherapy

The automated plan optimisation scheme optimises the beam-orientations and beam-weights for noncoplanar plans simultaneously. The required speed-up in the optimisation process was achieved through the use of random voxels in the beam-weight optimisation section and employing a simple dose model neglecting inhomogeneity correction. For the example patient, the automated optimisation process produced a comparable plan to the manually customised treatment plan produced via a mixture of human planning, to produce the beam-orientations, and optimisation to produce the beam weights. The treatment planning optimisation scheme presented has the ability to determine the best beam arrangement and beam-weights simultaneously. Further investigation is required into the abilities of the algorithm, but it shows great promise in its ability to produce non-coplanar treatment plans in a relatively short time. This could have a major impact in reducing the workload of human planers in devising appropriate non-coplanar treatment plans. Finally, it is mentioned that the process required 60 minutes of CPU time on a DEC Alphastation 4/266 with a 233 MHz processor. With newer, more powerful computers now available, this time could be reduced further through technological advances