Pareto surface approximation and multi-criteria optimization for intensity-modulated radiotherapy

One of the key components of radiotherapy cancer treatment is the process of making of a good or an optimal treatment plan. Since the goal of radiotherapy is to deliver a sufficient tumor dose while keeping the normal tissue dose as low as possible, the two tasks which are opposite, a certain trade-off has to be made. This process in the creating that satisfy those requirements is call the optimization. Pareto optimality is a situation where no preference criterion or objective can be better off without making at least one other criterion worse off or without any loss thereof. In this project, the goal was to implement Matlab inbuilt optimization functions that will create optimal plans by modifying already existing matRad files. Newly created methods were then analyzed and compared to the already used matRad optimization methods. Here, those implemented methods were applied to spherical, TG119 and liver phantoms, for which three radiation modalities were used; photons, protons and carbon ions.