Volume matching with application in medical treatment planning

Brachytherapy is an advanced cancer treatment method in which radioactive sources (seeds) are permanently placed in or near a tumor, giving a high radiation dose to the tumor while reducing the radiation exposure of the surrounding healthy tissues. The computation of seeds placement is a difficult problem that requires a significant amount of time to solve. One possible approach to get close to real time treatment planning is to reuse existing treatment plans, or precomputed solutions, if possible, since related tumors may have similar shape and size. In this paper we address the problem of matching an input object (tumor) against a repository of model objects associated with known treatment plans such that the overlap volume is maximized. We refer to the matching of objects based on maximum overlap as volume matching.